Bonn Conference Faces Stark Reality: 2C Is Simply Not Going To Happen With Current Pledges
Cimate negotiators gathering in Germany this week are still flush with the success of the Paris Agreement two years ago. But as they begin assembling a rule book for ensuring that the national pledges made in Paris are fulfilled, there comes a hard dose of reality. Those pledges, which constrain greenhouse gas emissions from now to 2030, will only deliver a third of the cuts needed to put the world on track to keep warming below the promised 2 degrees Celsius. And as for 1.5 degrees? Forget it, says a report from the United Nations Environment Programme released last week.
The Paris deal was the end of a long negotiation to find a formula for halting arguably the biggest threat to human society in the 21st century: climate change. It was a victory for climate diplomacy. But the climate responds to actions on carbon emissions, not hot air in conference halls.
So how are we doing? Do White House attempts to pull the U.S. out of the deal threaten to bring it crashing down? Is the deal itself too weak to forestall future warming? Or – with wind turbines and solar panels spreading across the planet, and electric cars zipping from test rigs to showrooms – could we be on the verge of fixing the climate?
EDIT
Even if all the pledges are fulfilled, they will deliver “only approximately one-third of the emissions reductions needed to be on a least-cost pathway for the goal of staying well below 2 degrees C,” a report from the UNEP, one of the Paris deal’s sponsors, concluded. The gap between the climate promise and the emissions pledges was, it said, “alarmingly high.”
Once emitted, most carbon dioxide, the main gas behind the warming, stays in the air for centuries. So to stop warming, the world has to bring emissions down to zero as soon as possible. And how much we emit between now and then will determine where global temperatures end up. Precise calculations of what is needed come with wide error bars. But the UNEP report concludes that to keep warming below 2 degrees, we have to limit future global emissions to about 1,000 billion tons of CO2. Keeping below 1.5 degrees sets the limit at just 300 billion tons. The report says that if nations stick to their 2030 Paris pledges, 80 percent of the budget for 2 degrees will be used up by that date – and we would already be out of time for keeping below 1.5 degrees.
EDIT
http://e360.yale.edu/features/why-post-paris-climate-challenge-is-even-harder-than-we-thought
= new reply since forum marked as read
