By Fatima Saka
The United Nations reports that the temperatures on Earth will shoot past a key danger point unless greenhouse gas emissions fall faster than countries have committed, warning of the consequences of inaction but also noting hopeful signs of progress.
The U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, Monday, said the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change revealed “a litany of broken climate promises” by governments and corporations, accusing them of stoking global warming by clinging to harmful fossil fuels.
“It is a file of shame, cataloguing the empty pledges that put us firmly on track toward an unlivable world,” he said.
However, governments agreed in the 2015 Paris Accord to keep global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius this century, ideally no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius. Yet temperatures have already increased by over 1.1 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times, resulting in measurable increases in disasters such flash floods, extreme heat, more intense hurricanes and longer-burning wildfires, putting human lives in danger and costing governments hundreds of billions of dollars to confront.
“Projected global emissions from (national pledges) place limiting global warming to 1.5C beyond reach and make it harder after 2030 to limit warming to 2C,” the panel said.
According to the report’s co-chair, James Skea of Imperial College London, “If we continue acting as we are now, we’re not even going to limit warming to 2 degrees, never mind 1.5 degrees.”
Ongoing investments in fossil fuel infrastructure and clearing large swaths of forest for agriculture undermine the massive curbs in emissions needed to meet the Paris goal, the report found.
“Emissions in 2019 were about 12 percent higher than they were in 2010 and 54 percent higher than in 1990,” said Skea.
“Limiting warming to 1.5C requires global greenhouse gas emissions to peak before 2025 at the latest and be reduced by 43 percent by 2030.
“The big message we’ve got (is that) human activities got us into this problem and human agency can actually get us out of it again.” He added.
“Also, the panel’s reports have become increasingly blunt since the first one was published in 1990, and the latest may be the last before the planet passes 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming,” Skea said.
The rate of growth has slowed from 2.1 percent per year in the early part of this century to 1.3 percent per year between 2010 and 2019, the report’s authors said. But they voiced “high confidence” that unless countries step up their efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions, the planet will on average be 2.4 degrees to 3.5 degrees Celsius warmer by the end of the century – a level experts say is sure to cause severe impacts for much of the world’s population.
Such cuts would be hard to achieve without drastic, economy-wide measures, the panel acknowledged. It’s more likely that the world will pass 1.5 degrees Celsius and efforts will then need to be made to bring temperatures back down again, including by removing vast amounts of carbon dioxide – the main greenhouse gas – from the atmosphere.
Many experts say this is not feasible with current technologies, and even if it could be done it would be far costlier than preventing the emissions in the first place.
The report, numbering thousands of pages, doesn’t single out individual countries for blame. But the figures show much of the carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere was released by rich countries that were the first to burn coal, oil and gas beginning with the industrial revolution.
The U.N. panel said 40 percent of emissions since then came from Europe and North America. Just over 12 percent can be attributed to East Asia.
Many countries and companies have used recent climate meetings to paint rosy pictures of their emissions-cutting efforts, while continuing to invest in fossil fuels and other polluting activities, Guterres charged.
“Some government and business leaders are saying one thing but doing another,” he said. “Simply put, they are lying. And the results will be catastrophic.”
However, Its authors highlight myriad ways in which the world can be brought back on track to 2 degrees Celsius or even, with great effort, return to 1.5 degrees Celsius after that threshold has been passed. This could require measures such as the removal of CO2 from the atmosphere with natural or artificial means, but also potentially risky technologies such as pumping aerosols into the sky to reflect sunlight.
The reports also recommended solutions to a rapid shift away from fossil fuels toward renewable energy such as increasingly cheap solar and wind power, the electrification of transport, less meat consumption, more efficient use of resources and massive financial support for poor countries unable to pay for such measures without help.
“Low-hanging fruit” by scientists is to plug methane leaks from mines, wells and landfills that release the potent but short-lived greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. A pact forged between the United States and China at last year’s U.N. climate conference in Glasgow aims to do just that.