Christopher M Brierley, Alexander Koch, Maryam Ilyas, Natalie Wennyk, Jarmo Sybren Kikstra

The Paris Agreement aims to limit the increase in global average temperature to 1.5 °C above preindustrial. A natural question for the public to ask is “But how much warmer than preindustrial is where I live?” We develop a pattern-scaling technique to present local annually-resolved, gridded temperature anomalies prior to the industrial burning of fossil fuels. On average the past 5 years, 2014-2018, was 1.13 °C above preindustrial (with a likely range of 1.00-1.26 °C). When accounting for the distribution of the human population and urban heat island effect, we find that people experienced an average warming of 1.61 °C (1.43-1.79 °C) over the same period. When the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015, the majority of the global population was exposed to local, annual temperatures warmer than 1.5 °C above preindustrial.