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The best possible future – one with less climate catastrophe, extinction, and human suffering – involves limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. But for that to happen, a new report warns, greenhouse gas levels must begin to decline by 2025.
“We are on the fast track to a climate disaster,” United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said on Monday as he announced a new report by the UN’s main climate body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“This is not fiction or exaggeration,” he added. “This is what science says will happen from current energy policy. We are on a path to global warming of more than double 1.5 degrees.
In 2016, almost every country signed the Paris climate agreement that pledged to prevent the worst climate impacts by limiting global warming to below 2 degrees Celsius, ideally to 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared to pre-industrial levels. But the world has already warmed by 1.1 degrees Celsius, and this new report makes it clear that the target for warmer temperatures may not be met unless humans immediately change the way we live, from how we get energy and food to where we live. they build and move around.
“It’s now or never if we want to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit),” Jim Skea of Imperial College London, one of the report’s authors, said in a statement. “Without immediate and deep emission reductions in all sectors, it is impossible.”
Skea is one of hundreds of scientists around the world who contributed to a report called “Climate Change 2022: Climate Change Mitigation,” the third and final installment of the IPCC’s Sixth Climate Assessment. The previous installment, published in the last few months, focused on summarizing the climate impacts that are already here and what is to come, as well as documenting ways to adapt to these impacts.
Faced with worsening climate impacts, from increasing heat waves and floods to growing food shortages, humans have spent the past decade adding fuel to the fire by continuing to spew more carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than ever before. .
Global average emissions were measured at about 59 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2019, about 12% higher than the level in 2010 and 54% higher than in 1990, according to a new report. This is a staggering increase.
But the blame for rising emissions does not fall on everyone equally.
“The 10% of households with the highest per capita emissions contribute a disproportionate global share. [greenhouse gas] emissions,” according to a new report summary. For example, in 2019, Small Island Developing States are estimated to have released 0.6% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
The only way to prevent widespread climate damage is to stop this trend immediately. To keep future temperatures below 1.5 degrees Celsius, according to the report, people around the world must collectively increase emissions by 2025 and then reduce emissions by 43% by 2030. Importantly, this includes reducing emissions of the greenhouse gas methane strong glass to 34% by 2030.
Finally, by 2050, people must achieve net zero emissions, which is when they release the same level of emissions into the atmosphere.
Despite all these deadlines, scientists warn that global average temperatures will exceed, or “overshoot,” 1.5 degrees Celsius, before returning below that level by the end of the century.
Keeping to 2.0 degrees Celsius in the future includes peaking global emissions in 2025, according to the report, then reducing emissions by 27% by 2030, and achieving net zero emissions by the early 2070s.
Perhaps the single biggest way to reduce emissions is to quickly switch from fossil fuels to renewable and other alternative energies. Limiting warming to 1.5 degrees, climate models show, involves reducing global coal, oil, and gas use in 2050 by roughly 95%, 60%, and 45%, respectively, compared to 2019 levels.
“Climate change is the result of more than a century of unsustainable energy and land use, lifestyles and patterns of consumption and production,” Skea said. “This report shows how acting today can move us towards a more just and sustainable world.”
The release of the report as Russia’s war in Ukraine has led to rising energy costs and, also, the conversation in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere is rapidly shifting away from Russian fossil fuels.
“Now we are facing a challenging time. We have learned about this brutal war in Ukraine,” said Petteri Taalas, Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organization, in a press conference on Monday, before connecting the fighting on the ground to the fight to limit climate change. “In the best case, this will accelerate the reduction of fossil energy use and also speed up the green transition. In the worst case, the interest in mitigating climate change will be challenged by this development.
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