Smoke and steam billows from Belchatow Power Station, Europe's largest coal-fired power plant operated by PGE Group, near Belchatow
Tue, October 18, 2022
By Timothy Gardner
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The latest pledges by countries to tackle global warming under the Paris Agreement are "woefully inadequate" to avert a rise in global temperatures that scientists say will worsen droughts, storms and floods, a report said on Wednesday.
The 2015 pact launched at a U.N. global climate summit requires 194 countries to detail their plans to fight climate change in what are known as nationally determined contributions, or NDCs.
In pledges made through September, the NDCs would reduce global emissions of greenhouse gases only 7% from 2019 levels by 2030, said the report titled "The State of NDCs: 2022." It was written by the World Resources Institute (WRI) global nonprofit research group.
Countries must strengthen their targets by about six times that, or at least 43%, to align with what the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says is enough to reach the Paris Agreement's goal of limiting the global temperature rise by 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees F), it said.
"It really looks like we're hitting a bit of a plateau," Taryn Fransen, a senior fellow at WRI and author of the report said in an interview. She added that the COVID-19 pandemic and economic woes may have mostly capped countries' ambitions to boost their NDCs since 2021.
Current NDCs propose to reduce emissions by 5.5 gigatonnes compared with the initial NDCs from 2015, nearly equal to eliminating the annual emissions of the United States. But only 10% of that planned reduction has been pledged since 2021.
On the bright side, Australia and Indonesia did boost their NDCs this year. "That got us some progress," Fransen said, "but there hasn't been a lot beyond that." Countries in the Paris Agreement are required to update their NDCs by 2025.
"If the pace of improvement from 2016 to today continues, the world will not only miss the Paris Agreement goals, but it will miss them by a long shot," the report said.
Much of the focus of this year's global climate talks, to be held next month in Egypt, will center on reducing emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon dioxide during its first 20 years in the atmosphere. In an example of the work yet to be done, WRI found that only 15 of the 119 countries that signed a Global Methane Pledge launched last year included a specific, quantified methane reduction target in their NDCs.
Fransen said economic and health benefits of reducing emissions, such as the build-out of the energy transition and reduced air pollution, can help build momentum to deeper cuts. "Seeing those benefits can only help drive more ambitions, but it is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem," she said.
(Reporting by Timothy Gardner in Washington; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
Climate Questions: Why do small degrees of warming matter?
Why do small degrees of warming matter? (AP Illustration/Peter Hamlin)
SETH BORENSTEIN and DANA BELTAJI
Wed, October 19, 2022
On a thermometer, a tenth of a degree seems tiny, barely noticeable. But small changes in average temperature can reverberate in a global climate to turn into big disasters as weather gets wilder and more extreme in a warmer world.
In 2015, countries around the world agreed to cut greenhouse gas emissions to limit global warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) and pursue a goal of curbing warming to 1.5 Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) as part of the Paris Agreement.
Two degrees of difference might not be noticeable if you're gauging the weather outside, but for global average temperatures, these small numbers make a big difference.
“Every tenth of a degree matters,” is a phrase that climate scientists around the world keep repeating.
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EDITOR’S NOTE: This story is part of an ongoing series answering some of the most fundamental questions around climate change, the science behind it, the effects of a warming planet and how the world is addressing it.
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The Earth has already warmed at least 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times, giving the world around 0.4 degrees Celsius (0.7 Fahrenheit) of more heating before passing the goal and suffering even more catastrophic climate change events, scientists have said.
These tenths of a degree are a big deal because the temperatures represent a global average of warming. Some parts of the world, especially land mass and northern latitudes like the Arctic have already warmed more than the 1.1 Celsius average and have far surpassed 1.5 Celsius, according to estimates.
It's helpful to look at temperatures like a bell curve, rather than just the average which doesn't reveal “hidden extremes,” said Princeton University climate scientist Gabe Vecchi.
“On the far end where the bell shape is very narrow, that is telling you the odds of very extreme events,” he said. “If you have a slight shift of the average of the peak of that bell to the warming direction, what that results in is a substantial decrease in the odds of extremely cold temperatures and a substantial increase in the odds of extremely warm temperatures.”
It's a similar picture with sea level rise, where the average obscures how some places are seeing much higher sea level increases than others, he said.
Most nations — including the world’s two largest emitters, the U.S. and China — aren’t on track to limit warming to 1.5 Celsius or even 2 Celsius, according to scientists and experts who track global action on climate change, despite promises to cut their emissions to “net zero”.
If temperatures increase by about 2 more degrees Celsius by the end of the century, the world will experience five times the floods, storms, drought and heat waves, according to estimates by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“All bets are off” when it comes to how climate systems will respond to more warming, warned Brown University climate scientist Kim Cobb. The threat of some irreversible changes and feedback loops that amplify warming, such as the thawing of permafrost that traps massive amounts of greenhouse gas, could trigger even more heating.
“It’s just staggering to think about how many people will be under immediate threat of climate-related extremes in a two degree world," Cobb said.
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Follow AP’s climate and environment coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment
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Why do small degrees of warming matter? (AP Illustration/Peter Hamlin)
SETH BORENSTEIN and DANA BELTAJI
Wed, October 19, 2022
On a thermometer, a tenth of a degree seems tiny, barely noticeable. But small changes in average temperature can reverberate in a global climate to turn into big disasters as weather gets wilder and more extreme in a warmer world.
In 2015, countries around the world agreed to cut greenhouse gas emissions to limit global warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) and pursue a goal of curbing warming to 1.5 Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) as part of the Paris Agreement.
Two degrees of difference might not be noticeable if you're gauging the weather outside, but for global average temperatures, these small numbers make a big difference.
“Every tenth of a degree matters,” is a phrase that climate scientists around the world keep repeating.
__
EDITOR’S NOTE: This story is part of an ongoing series answering some of the most fundamental questions around climate change, the science behind it, the effects of a warming planet and how the world is addressing it.
___
The Earth has already warmed at least 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times, giving the world around 0.4 degrees Celsius (0.7 Fahrenheit) of more heating before passing the goal and suffering even more catastrophic climate change events, scientists have said.
These tenths of a degree are a big deal because the temperatures represent a global average of warming. Some parts of the world, especially land mass and northern latitudes like the Arctic have already warmed more than the 1.1 Celsius average and have far surpassed 1.5 Celsius, according to estimates.
It's helpful to look at temperatures like a bell curve, rather than just the average which doesn't reveal “hidden extremes,” said Princeton University climate scientist Gabe Vecchi.
“On the far end where the bell shape is very narrow, that is telling you the odds of very extreme events,” he said. “If you have a slight shift of the average of the peak of that bell to the warming direction, what that results in is a substantial decrease in the odds of extremely cold temperatures and a substantial increase in the odds of extremely warm temperatures.”
It's a similar picture with sea level rise, where the average obscures how some places are seeing much higher sea level increases than others, he said.
Most nations — including the world’s two largest emitters, the U.S. and China — aren’t on track to limit warming to 1.5 Celsius or even 2 Celsius, according to scientists and experts who track global action on climate change, despite promises to cut their emissions to “net zero”.
If temperatures increase by about 2 more degrees Celsius by the end of the century, the world will experience five times the floods, storms, drought and heat waves, according to estimates by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“All bets are off” when it comes to how climate systems will respond to more warming, warned Brown University climate scientist Kim Cobb. The threat of some irreversible changes and feedback loops that amplify warming, such as the thawing of permafrost that traps massive amounts of greenhouse gas, could trigger even more heating.
“It’s just staggering to think about how many people will be under immediate threat of climate-related extremes in a two degree world," Cobb said.
___
Follow AP’s climate and environment coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment
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