Call for bold plans as agency issues troubling outlook
The head of the United Nations isn’t planning to let just any world leader speak about climate change at today’s special “action summit”. Only those with new, specific and bold plans can command the podium, SecretaryGeneral Antonio Guterres said.
So sit down, Brazil. Sit down, Saudi Arabia. Sit down, Poland.
“People can only speak if they come with positive steps. That is kind of a ticket,” Guterres said. “For bad news don’t come.”
Brazil’s, Poland’s and Saudi Arabia’s proposals for dealing with climate change fell short, so they’re not on the summit schedule. The US didn’t even bother, according to a UN official.
Leaders from 64 nations, the European Union, more than a dozen companies and banks, a few cities and a state will present plans at the Climate Action Summit.
Underscoring the problem, the UN’s World Meteorological Organisation released a science report showing that in the last several years, warming, sea level rise and carbon pollution have all accelerated.
Guterres wants nations to be carbon-neutral by 2050, to commit to no new coal power plants after 2020 and reduce carbon pollution by 45 per cent in the next century. Yesterday, 87 countries pledged to decarbonise in a way consistent with one of the international community’s tightest temperature goals. The purpose of the summit is to come up with new green proposals a year earlier than the 2020 deadline that is in the 2015 Paris climate agreement.
World leaders agreed in 2009 to try to keep warming to just 2C since preindustrial times. Then in 2015 they added a secondary, tougher goal to keep warming to just 1.5C.
The new weather agency report showed that the world has warmed already by 1.1C. So that means the goals are to limit further warming to 0.9C from now or even 0.4C from now. Efforts to reduce carbon pollution need to be tripled to keep from hitting the 2C mark and must increase fivefold to limit warming to 1.5C since preindustrial times.
As bad as that sounds, it’s wrong and overly optimistic to use the mid-1880s as the benchmark, said Pennsylvania State University climate scientist
Michael Mann. He said that many studies, including the WMO’s, are overlooking that the world warmed 0.2C from human causes between the mid-1700s and the 1880s.
The agency said the last five years were the warmest five on record and even 0.2C hotter than the first half of the decade, a significant jump in just a few years.
If the world keeps temperatures to the 1.5C goal instead of the 2C one, 420 million fewer people will be exposed to heat waves and 10 million fewer will be vulnerable to sea level rise, Nasa climate scientist Cynthia Rosenzweig said. A larger, more international report looking at climate change and oceans and ice will be released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on Thursday.