Warming slightly less disastrous – NRC

How much further will humans let the earth warm up? Not entirely coincidentally, several reports appeared this week, with varying forecasts and scenarios. Most were troubling, but there was also a hint of tentative hope.

The red line: everything necessary has been set in motion to slow down climate change, but it is still far from enough to achieve the agreements in the Paris Climate Agreement. The goal is to limit warming to a maximum of 2°C, and aim for 1.5°C – the Earth has already warmed on average 1.1°C since the Industrial Revolution.

The timing of all those reports is not random. The twenty-seventh climate summit (COP27) of the United Nations will take place from 6 to 18 November in Sharm-el-Sheikh, Egypt. The reports now appearing are increasing the pressure on government leaders to do more.

To achieve the 1.5°C target, emissions of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide and methane, must be reduced to zero by 2050. A gigantic task. But for the time being, those emissions are only rising. This happened again in 2021, so reported the World Meteorological Organization this Wednesday. In fact, the concentration of methane in the air rose more than in any other year since the measurements started 40 years ago. The cause is not yet clear.

The question is whether there are countries that are announcing stricter targets at COP27

UNEP, the UN environmental agency, concluded that “there is no credible path” to reach the 1.5°C target. In his last Emissions Gap Report does the agency outline the gap between current climate policies, the goals that countries have set in their ‘national contributions’ (the Nationally Determined Contributions, NDCs) and the UN targets of 1.5 and 2°C respectively. The outlook has already improved a lot since 2015. Back then, there was still a disastrous warming of perhaps 4°C at the end of this century. Policy has meanwhile reduced that forecast to around 2.8°C. But that is still a harbinger of much more and more intense heat waves, droughts, showers, floods, human casualties and major economic damage. If, in addition, all current NDCs are converted into policy, that figure will drop to 2.4 to 2.6.

Disappointment

UNEP had hoped that countries would announce new NDCs with stricter targets after the summit a year ago in Glasgow. That hardly happened. The disappointment drips from the report.

The same disappointment also rises the report State of Climate Action 2022, prepared by seven organizations, including Climate Action Tracker and the World Resources Institute. That report also maps the gap between the Paris goals and what countries are doing, but then broken down into sectors such as electricity generation, buildings, transport, industry, food and agriculture. No sector is on track. Some sectors are moving in the right direction at a “promising, but insufficient” pace – such as green power generation and electric car sales. Other sectors are “a lot below” the required pace and some sectors are even going completely in the wrong direction.

The cautiously positive news came from the International Energy Agency (IEA). Russia’s invasion of Ukraine represents a tipping point in the energy market registers the IEA to be World Energy Outlook 2022. Countries that imported Russian oil or gas are accelerating their share of nuclear energy or wind and solar power in response to the invasion. The IEA now presents for the first time a scenario, based on standing policies, in which global demand for oil, coal and gas peaks and then declines. The use of coal will already decline in the coming years, that of natural gas will reach its peak at the end of this decade, and that of petroleum sometime in the mid-1930s, the IEA estimates. However, the agency also comes to the conclusion that this development is largely insufficient to achieve the Paris goals. It amounts to a warming of approximately 2.5°C at the end of this century.

The question is whether there are countries that will announce stricter targets at the upcoming climate summit in Sharm el-Sheikh. The subject is not high on the agenda for this meeting. However, it will be about financing, among other things: how much are the developed countries, which have caused the climate problem, willing to pay poorer countries to adapt to global warming. The issue arose last October, when Pakistan demanded compensation from the West for an estimated $40 billion in damage caused by the floods.