UN report says world is racing to well past warming limit as carbon emissions rise
Countries’ current emissions pledges to limit climate change would still put the world on track to warm by nearly 3 degrees Celsius this century, according to a United Nations analysis released Monday.
The annual Emissions Gap report, which assesses countries’ promises to tackle climate change compared with what is needed, finds the world faces between 2.5C (4.5F) and 2.9C (5.2F) of warming above preindustrial levels if governments do not boost climate action.
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.
At 3C of warming, scientists predict the world could pass several catastrophic points of no return, from the runaway melting of ice sheets to the Amazon rainforest drying out.
“Present trends are racing our planet down a dead-end 3C temperature rise,” said U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. “The emissions gap is more like an emissions canyon.”
World leaders will soon meet in Dubai for the annual U.N. climate summit COP28 with the aim of keeping the Paris Agreement warming target of 1.5C alive.
But the new U.N. report does little to inspire hope that this goal remains in reach, finding that planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions must fall by 42% by 2030 to hold warming at 1.5C (2.7F).
Even in the most optimistic emissions scenario, the chance of now limiting warming to 1.5C is just 14% — adding to a growing body of scientific evidence suggesting the goal is dead.
Global greenhouse gas emissions rose by 1.2% from 2021 to 2022, reaching a record 57.4 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent.
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.
The report assessed countries’ Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), which they are required to update every five years, to determine how much the world might warm if these plans were fully implemented.
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 compares unconditional pledges — promises with no strings attached, which would lead to a 2.9C temperature rise — to conditional pledges that would hold warming to 2.5C.
“That is basically unchanged compared with last year’s report,” said Anne Olhoff, chief scientific editor of the report.
The anticipated level of warming is slightly higher than 2022 projections, which then pointed toward a rise of between 2.4C and 2.6C by 2100, because the 2023 report ran simulations on more climate models.
However, the world has made progress since the Paris Agreement was adopted in 2015. Warming projections based on emissions at that time “were way higher than they are now”, Olhoff said.
It’s dangerous already, said UNEP Director Inger Andersen.
“Temperatures are hitting new heights, while extreme weather events are occurring more and more often, developing faster and becoming much more intense,” Andersen said. The new report “tells us that it’s going to take a massive and urgent shift to avoid these records falling year after year.”
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.
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said “the emissions gap is more like an emissions canyon — a canyon littered with broken promises, broken lives and broken records.”
That’s why the report said the chance of keeping warming at or under 1.5 degrees is about one-in-seven or about 14%, “very, very slim indeed,” Olhoff said.
Guterres reiterated his call for countries to phase out the use of fossil fuels in time to keep the 1.5 degree limit alive, saying “otherwise we’re simply inflating the lifeboats while breaking the oars.”
“We know now that the impacts of climate change, of global warming of somewhere between 2.5 and 3 degrees Celsius are going to be massive,” Olhoff said in an interview. “It’s basically not a future I think anybody would want for their children and grandchildren and so forth. The good news, of course, is that we can act and we know what we have to do.” (AP/Reuters)