2C limit

The Paris agreement text commits the world’s governments to limiting global warming to no more than 2C above preindustrial levels. But the emissions reductions it lays out don’t actually get us there. Even if all the world’s countries meet their targets (which is very unlikely, since the targets are non-binding) we’ll still be hurtling toward more than 3C of global warming, and possibly as high as 4.4C by 2100. What might our planet look like if it warms by 4C? No one can say for certain, but projections show that this level of warming is likely to bring about heatwaves not seen on Earth for 5 million years. Southern Europe could dry up into a desert. Sea levels could rise by 1.2 meters before the century is out, drowning cities like Amsterdam and New York. Furthermore, 40% of species will be at risk of extinction. Most of our rainforests will wither away. Crop yields could collapse by 35%, destabilising the world’s food system and triggering widespread famine. In short, a 4C world looks very bleak indeed. link

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Global warming passes 1C in 2015 – UK Met Office – link
Global warming halfway to UN’s 2C limit – New Scientist: link   ____________________________________________________________    

         Below: 

• Origins of the 2C limit
• Evidence on the 1.5C threshold
• Warnings of increasing temperatures
• Is there a need for a target

 Origins of the 2C limit

Origins of the 2C limit. In 2010, when the 2°C goal was adopted at a major conference in Cancun, Mexico, the carbon budget for 450 ppm, or 2°C, was formidably tight: Only a third was left, 1,000 gigatons of CO2. Since humans were emitting 40 gigatons a year, the carbon budget would be easily blown before midcentury. The 2°C goal is a theoretical limit for how much warming humans could accept. For leading climatologist James Hansen, even the 2°C limit is unsafe. And without emissions cuts, global temperatures are projected to rise by 4°C by the end of the century. Temperatures have already risen 1.2 to 1.3°C .  According to the Mercatur Research Institute, the 1.5°C budget is more or less blown—a widely shared conclusion. Without a drastic increase in international action on cutting emissions, they say, the carbon budget for 2°C will likely be blown by 2030. (You can check the Institute’s running carbon budget clock here.)  link to December 2017 article – ‘The dirty secret of the world’s plan to avert climate disaster’.

Evidence of 1.5 threshold

April 2017: Analysis: Just four years left of the 1.5C carbon budget. Four years of current emissions would be enough to blow what’s left of the carbon budget for a good chance of keeping global temperature rise to 1.5C. link

37 things you need to know about 1.5C global warming

January 2017: Planet could breach 1.5C rise one year from now.  As of now, by the least optimistic calculations, the world has one year to stop pumping CO2 into the atmosphere if we want to stop climate change at 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, the aim of the Paris climate agreement. A carbon countdown clock from researchers at the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change does the math, estimating the time left at current emission levels. Even with a higher limit of two degrees of warming and the most optimistic projections, we still only have about 23 years to fully transition to a carbon-free economy.  link

August 2016: Scientists warn world will miss key climate target. Leading climate scientists have warned that the Earth is perilously close to breaking through a 1.5C upper limit for global warming, only eight months after the target was set. link   (Temperatures peaked at 1.38C above pre-industrial levels in February and March 2016 – link

December 2015: The 2C target is a value judgment: Greenland’s ice sheet could disintegrate in a 2C world – link

Warnings of increasing temperatures

August 2018: Why 2 degrees of global warming will be way worse than 1.5. Signatories to the Paris climate agreement agreed to what is by now a familiar goal: “holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C.” How important is that difference, though? How much worse would 2 degrees be than 1.5? Is it worth the extra effort – and it would be a truly heroic effort – to limit temperature rise to that lower target? A 2016 study in the journal Earth System Dynamics tackles this directly. link

April 2018: Bold action needed before 2020 to hold global warming below 1.5C. A recent report found that unless bold climate action is taken in the next couple of years, before 2020, it may become impossible to hold global warming below 1.5C. As important as it is to measure global progress toward cutting greenhouse gas emissions, it must be recognised that the national contributions under the Paris Agreement don’t legally commence until 2020. Since the beginning of the UN climate change negotiations and through the Paris Agreement, it has always been understood that developed countries would take the lead in transitioning to low-carbon energy sources because they are responsible for the vast majority of historic emissions. Many developed countries’ pre-2020 obligations remain unmet and now some seem eager to forego early action altogether. link

February 2018: Technology to stay below 2C isn’t promising. In the two-degrees emissions scenarios, techniques (including CCS, reforestation) have to start soaking up at least 11 billion tons of CO2 per year around 2050 in order to offset our continued emissions. If we bank on that future offset, but it fails to materialize, we will find that it’s too late to cut our emissions and limit global warming to two degrees Celsius. A report by EASAC (European Academies Science Advisory Council) finds that few options look like they could scale up to 3 or 4 billion tons, and none is on track to do so at this point. link

January 2018: Met Office warns of global temperature rise exceeding 1.5C limit – link

November 2017: As for 1.5 degrees? Forget it. As negotiators in Bonn begin assembling a rule book for ensuring that 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 2C. link  September 2018: World ‘nowhere near on track’ to avoid warming beyond 1.5C target – link

October 2017: UN – Prepare for a world 3C warmer in 80 years. As things stand, the UN says, even fully implementing the goals of the Paris Agreement will deliver only one third of what is needed for the world to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. The United Nations assessment says a temperature increase of at least 3C by 2100 is very likely. Also, action by the private sector and by cities and other groups below national level is not increasing fast enough to help to close the gap. link

May 2017: What the world will look like 4C warmer.  link

January 2017: Global 2C warming limit not feasible, warns top economist – link

June 2016: Window for avoiding 1.5C global warming ‘closed’ – link

Is there a need for a target?

Should we halt CO2 emissions altogether? If CO2 emissions came to a sudden halt, the carbon dioxide already in Earth’s atmosphere could continue to warm our planet for hundreds of years, according to a Princeton University-led study. The study suggested it might take a lot less carbon than previously thought to reach the global temperature scientists deem unsafe. The researchers simulated an Earth on which, after 1,800 billion tons of carbon entered the atmosphere, all CO2 emissions suddenly stopped. Scientists commonly use the scenario of emissions screeching to a stop to gauge the heat-trapping staying power of CO2. Within a millennium of this simulated shutoff, the carbon itself faded steadily with 40% absorbed by Earth’s oceans and landmasses within 20 years and 80% soaked up at the end of the 1,000 years. By itself, such a decrease of atmospheric CO2 should lead to cooling. But the heat trapped by the CO2 took a divergent track. After a century of cooling, the planet warmed by 0.37 degrees Celsius (0.66 Fahrenheit) during the next 400 years as the ocean absorbed less and less heat. While the resulting temperature spike seems slight, a little heat goes a long way here. Earth has warmed by only 0.85 degrees Celsius (1.5 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that global temperatures a mere 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than pre-industrial levels would dangerously interfere with the climate system. To avoid that point would mean humans have to keep cumulative CO2 emissions below 1,000 billion tons of carbon, about half of which has already been put into the atmosphere since the dawn of industry. link

June 2018: Limiting global warming to 2C now aspirational. The chance of limiting human-induced global warming to less than 2 degrees is rapidly disappearing as carbon emissions again ramp up in China while reductions in the US and elsewhere stall. Early indications are that 2018 could see a large rise in emissions with China’s carbon emissions in the first quarter jumping 4%. 2017’s increase was partly caused by a revival of China’s reliance on heavy industrial growth to prop up the economy, and a drop in hydro electric generation amid poor rainfall. This year’s growth, though, is also being spurred by a pick-up in the global economy. link

January 2017: What’s so special about 2C? The simple answer is that it is a target that could be politically agreed on the international stage. It was first suggested in 1975 as an upper threshold beyond which we would arrive at a climate unrecognisable to humans. Temperature increases beyond 1C may elicit rapid, unpredictable and non-linear responses that could lead to extensive ecosystem damage. When the planet was 2C colder than during the industrial revolution, we were in the grip of an ice age  link

May 2017:  When oil companies strategy is 4C rise. In 2014, Shell was accused of pursuing a business strategy on 4C warming. Now oil and gas company Santos has admitted its business plans are based on a climate change scenario of a 4C rise in global temperatures, at odds with internationally agreed efforts. Will Steffen (Australian National University) said the difference between the ice age and the Holocene age, which Earth has been in for about 12,000 years, was 4C. “You’d be locking in tens of metres of sea-level rise, and you can forget about the world cities.” There have already been warnings from UN agencies that current government pledges only hold warming to 3C – well beyond what climate scientists consider the limit of safety. link

October 2014: Ditch the 2C warming goal – effectively unachievable. The 2C target has been repeated like a mantra, mentioned thousands of times in newspaper articles. But two academics in the prestigious journal Nature, argue that the 2C target has outlived its usefulness. They say it should be abandoned and replaced with a series of measures, “vital signs”, of the planet’s health. Under the headline, “Ditch the 2C warming goal”, they argue the 2C limit is “politically and scientifically … wrong-headed”, it is “effectively unachievable” and it has let politicians off the hook, allowing them to “pretend that they are organising for action when, in fact, most have done little.”. link