1°C between life and death
In gloomy state of Earth report, UN climate panel sets a deadline to act
washington — Preventing an extra single degree of heat could make a life-or-death difference in the next few decades for multitudes of people and ecosystems on this fast-warming planet, an international panel of scientists reported on Sunday. But they provide little hope the world will rise to the challenge.
The Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its gloomy report at a meeting in Incheon, South Korea. In the 728-page document, the UN organisation detailed how Earth’s weather, health and ecosystems would be in better shape if the world’s leaders could somehow limit future human-caused warming to just a half degree Celsius from now, instead of the globally agreed-upon goal of 1° Celsius.
“For some people this is a life-or-death situation without a doubt,” said Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald, a lead author of the report.
Limiting warming to half-degree Celsius from now means the world can keep “a semblance” of the ecosystems we have. Adding another half-degree Celsius on top of that — the looser global goal — essentially means a different and more challenging Earth for people and species, said another of the report’s lead authors, Ove HoeghGuldberg, director of the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland, Australia.
But meeting the more ambitious goal of slightly less warming would require immediate, draconian cuts in emissions of heat-trapping gases and dramatic changes in the energy field. While the UN panel says technically that’s possible, it saw little chance of the needed adjustments happening.
In 2010, international negotiators adopted a goal of limiting warming to 2°C since pre-industrial times. It’s called the 2-degree goal. In 2015, when the nations of the world agreed to the historic Paris climate agreement, they set dual goals: 2°C and a more demanding target of 1.5°C from pre-industrial times. The 1.5 was at the urging of vulnerable countries that called 2 degrees a death sentence. —
Avoiding global climate chaos will require a major transformation of society and the world economy that is “unprecedented in scale,” the UN said on Monday in a landmark report that warns time is running out to avert disaster.
Earth’s surface has warmed I°C (1.8°F) — enough to lift oceans and unleash a crescendo of deadly storms, floods and droughts — and is on track towards an unliveable 3°C or 4°C rise.
At current levels of greenhouse gas emissions, we could pass the 1.5C marker as early as 2030, and no later than mid-century, the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) reported with “high confidence”.
“The next few years are probably the most important in human history,” Debra Roberts, head of the Environmental Planning and Climate Protection Department in Durban, South Africa, and an IPCC co-chair, said.
A Summary for Policymakers of the 400-page tome underscores how quickly global warming has outstripped humanity’s attempt to tame it, and outlines options for avoiding the worst ravages of a climate-addled future.
“We have done our job, we have now passed on the message,” Jim Skea, a professor at Imperial College London’s Centre for Environmental Policy and an IPCC cochair, said at a press conference.
“Now it is over to governments — it’s their responsibility to act on it.” Before the Paris Agreement was inked in 2015, nearly a decade of scientific research rested on the assumption that 2°C was the guardrail for a climate-safe world.
The IPCC report, however, shows that global warming impacts have come sooner and hit harder than predicted.
“Things that scientists have been saying would happen further in the future are happening now,” Jennifer Morgan, Executive Director of Greenpeace International, told AFP.
To have at least a 50/50 chance of staying under the 1.5°C cap without overshooting the mark, the world must, by 2050, become “carbon neutral”, according to the report.
“That means every tonne of CO2 we put into the atmosphere will have to be balanced by a tonne of CO2 taken out,” said lead coordinating author Myles Allen, head of the University of Oxford’s Climate Research Programme.
Drawing from more than 6,000 recent scientific studies, the report laid out four pathways to that goal.
The most ambitious would see a radical drawdown in energy consumption coupled with a rapid shift away from fossil fuels and a swift decline in CO2 emissions starting in 2020. It would also avoid an “overshoot” of the 1.5°C threshold.
A contrasting “pay later” scenario compensates for a high-consumption lifestyles and continued use of fossil fuels with a temporary breaching of the 1.5°C ceiling.
It depends heavily on the use of biofuels. But the scheme would need to plant an area twice the size of India in biofuel crops, and assumes that some 1,200 billion tonnes of CO2 — 30 years’ worth of emissions at current rates — can be safely locked away underground.
“Is it fair for the next generation to pay to take the CO2 out of the atmosphere that we are now putting into it?”, asked Allen. “We have to start having that debate.”
The stakes are especially high for small island states, developing nations in the tropics, and countries with densely-populated delta regions already suffering from rising seas. “We have only the slimmest of opportunities remaining to avoid unthinkable damage to the climate system that supports life as we know it,” said Amjad Abdulla, chief negotiator at UN climate talks for the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS).
Limiting global warming to 1.5°C comes with a hefty price tag: some $2.4 trillion (2.1 trillion euros) of investments in the global energy system every year between 2016 and 2035, or about 2.5 percent of world GDP.
That amount, however, must be weighed against the even steeper cost of inaction, the report says.
The path to a climate-safe world has become a tightrope, and will require an unprecedented marshalling of human ingenuity, the authors said.
“The problem isn’t going to be solved with a silver bullet,” Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, director of the University of Queensland’s Global Change Institute, told AFP.
“We need a hail of silver bullets.” The IPCC report was timed to feed into the December UN climate summit in Katowice, Poland, where world leaders will be under
In some parts of the world, national borders will become irrelevant. You can set up a wall to try to contain 10,000 and 20,000 and one million people, but not 10 million.
Aromar Revi, An author of the report
For governments, the idea of overshooting the target but then coming back to it is attractive because then they don’t have to make such rapid changes. But it has a lot of disadvantages.
Drew Shindell, An author of the report
pressure to ramp up national carbon-cutting pledges which — even if fulfilled — would yield a 3C world.
The week-long meeting in Incheon, South Korea — already deep into overtime — deadlocked
when Saudi Arabia demanded the deletion of a passage noting the need for global CO2 emissions to decline “well before 2030”.
Concerns that the United States would seek to obstruct the process proved unfounded.—