U.N. warns world will miss climate target
The New York Times
The world has failed in its goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial times, the United Nations said Wednesday, in a sober assessment that laid out a new goal for fighting climate change that would set the world on an uncertain path.
A decade ago, most of the world’s countries agreed in Paris to try to limit global temperature rise to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius while aiming for the more ambitious target of 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit.
But Wednesday’s 141-page U.N. report warned that the world is certain to breach that mark and should focus on finding ways to limit “overshoot” and eventually bring global temperatures back down.
Despite advancements in wind and solar power, countries have continued to burn oil, gas and coal, releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere where it traps the sun’s heat and has raised average global temperatures by about 1.4 degrees Celsius, or 2.52 degrees Fahrenheit. The damage from global warming is now felt across the planet, with intensifying heat, drought, floods, fire and other threats to humans, animals, and plants.
The idea laid out in the U.N. report would be extremely difficult because it would require pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere on a colossal scale. Achieving that would potentially mean blanketing enormous parts of the world with forests or relying on novel technologies for sucking carbon out of the air that haven’t yet worked on any significant scale.
Under such a scenario, the planet would still continue to heat up for the foreseeable future and wouldn’t return to temperatures like today’s for decades or even centuries. And some changes, like glacial melting or rising seas, would be essentially irreversible.
“This is by no means an acceptable or preferred pathway,” the U.N. said in its report Wednesday. “It is simply the best remaining option.”
But even this fallback plan would require the kind of climate ambition and major cuts in greenhouse gas emissions that have long been out of reach. To add to the challenges, the Trump administration has withdrawn the United States, the largest historical emitter of greenhouse gases, from the global fight against climate change and weakened domestic environmental policies.
Based on current climate policies among nations and trends, the planet is expected to warm 2.6 degrees Celsius, or 4.7 degrees Fahrenheit, by the end of the century.
“So long as we fail to find political will, we will be marching past every target we put out there. That is the danger,” said Michael Mann, a professor of Earth and environmental science at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved with the report.
Mann noted that even at current levels of warming, “dangerous and catastrophic climate change is here,” referencing last week’s deadly glacial collapse and flood in Nepal.