UN report says world is racing to well past warming limit as carbon emissions rise instead of plunge
Earth is speeding to 2.5 to 2.9 degrees Celsius (4.5 to 5.2 degrees Fahrenheit) of global warming since pre-industrial times, set to blow well past the agreed-upon international climate threshold, a United Nations report calculated.
To have an even money shot at keeping warming to the 1.5-degree Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) limit adopted by the 2015 Paris climate agreement, countries have to slash their emissions by 42% by the end of the decade, said the U.N. Environment Programme’s Emissions Gap report issued Monday. Carbon emissions from the burning of coal, oil and gas rose 1.2% last year, the report said.
This year Earth got a taste of what’s to come, said the report, which sets the table for international climate talks later this month.
Through the end of September, the daily global average temperature exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius above mid-19th century levels on 86 days this year, the report said. But that increased to 127 days because nearly all of the first two weeks of November and all of October reached or exceeded 1.5 degrees, according to the European climate service Copernicus. That's 40% of the days so far this year.
On Friday, the globe hit 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees) above pre-industrial levels for the first time in recorded history, according to Copernicus Deputy Director Samantha Burgess.
“It’s really an indication that we are already seeing a change, an acceleration,” said report lead author Anne Olhoff of Denmark’s climate think tank Concito. “Based on what science tells us, this is just like a whisper. What will be in the future will be more like a roar.”
The 1.5-degree goal is based on a time period measured over many years, not days, scientists said. Earlier reports put Earth reaching that longer term limit in early 2029 without dramatic emission changes.
To keep that from happening, the countries of the world have to come up with more stringent goals to cut emissions of carbon dioxide and implement policies to act on those goals, Olhoff said.
In the past two years only nine countries have come up with new goals, so that hasn’t moved the needle, but some countries, including the United States and those in Europe, have put policies in place that slightly improved the outlook, she said.
The United States’ Inflation Reduction Act, which has $375 billion in spending on clean energy, by 2030 would reduce yearly emissions of carbon dioxide by about 1 billion metric tons, Olhoff said.
That sounds like a lot, but the world in 2022 spewed 57.4 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases. Current country pledges would trim that to 55 billion metric tons, and to limit warming to the 1.5 degree mark emissions in 2030 have to be down to 33 billion metric tons. That's an “emissions gap” of 22 billion metric tons.
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