YOU can tuck your head between your knees and kiss your target of ‘not-more-than-1.5-degrees-Celsius-warming’ goodbye.
Trump is out and Biden is in, and you will hear a lot of talk about meeting that never-exceed +1.5C limit. The blather began when the US president convened his ‘Climate Leaders’ Summit’ (virtual) last week, and ends in November in Glasgow with COP-26, the five-yearly UN climate meeting where the commitments actually get made.
But it is already clear that the Glasgow meeting cannot keep the warming under +1.5C. That target was close to impossible when they adopted it at the last big climate summit in Paris in 2015, and that train has now left the station.
This is not a licence for despair. Cutting greenhouse emissions is still important and urgent, but the issue is now also how to deal with much more dangerous warming. We will need new strategies and new technologies to contain the damage, but first – how can we know for sure that we will go through +1.5C by 2035, or possibly even by 2030?
By the numbers. The scientific consensus is that 430-435 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will commit us to +1.5C. We are now at 415ppm, and in an average year we put about another 2.5ppm into the atmosphere. So we have at the most 20ppm left to play with before we commit to +1.5C, and we will cover that distance by 2029.
Or rather, we’ll get there by then if we don’t cut our emissions very fast. In fact, we have to cut them by half in 2030 if we want to be safe. But even in the plague year of 2020 we only cut our emissions by seven per cent. Most years we don’t cut them at all.
It’s the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) that tell the tale. NDCs were an innovation of the Paris summit in 2015 where every country was asked how much emissions it was willing to cut.
Donald Trump looked foolish when he demanded to renegotiate the US emission cuts that Barack Obama had promised. There was no negotiation in 2015. Each country’s obligation was whatever it offered.
The theory at the recent summit (originally scheduled for 2020) was that every country would raise its target for emissions cuts. We need 50pc emissions cuts by 2030 to stay below the +1.5C limit.
Russia and the UK are the stars among the major countries, offering 70pc and 68pc cuts in their emissions respectively compared with 1990. The whole European Union will make 55pc cuts compared with 1990. If everybody else did the same, we’d be home and dry by 2030.
The US says 50-52pc cuts and Canada says 40-45pc cuts, but only compared with 2005. (They moved the goalposts.) Japan says 46pc cuts, but only compared with 2013. Mexico and Australia are in the mid-20s, India and Indonesia won’t set a number at all, and China says it will try to ‘peak’ its emissions by 2030 (i.e. they will continue to grow every year until 2030).
In other words, the countries responsible for more than half the world’s emissions are making no promises. Some, like China and India, will still be raising their emissions throughout this decade. Even if those who make promises actually keep them, we will end up in 2030 with a global cut of 30pc at best. So wave goodbye to ‘no more than 1.5C of warming’.
What do we do now? Starting with COP-26, we start developing ways to get carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere (Carbon Dioxide Removal – CDR), and to hold the heat down while we work on that (Solar Radiation Management – SRM). And we work as fast as we can to get our emissions down, because the other stuff is just short-term techno-fixes.
&uuid=(email))