THE World Economic Forum (as do many other ‘authorities’) tells us that: ‘The 1.5-degree Celsius threshold is considered a critical threshold, as it is the point at which the impacts of climate change are expected to become increasingly severe.’
Yet for some years now it’s been obvious, although widely ignored, that there’s no realistic prospect of humanity keeping global temperatures below the Paris Agreement target of 1.5ºC above pre-industrial levels – or indeed below the somewhat easier target of ‘well below’ 2ºC. Here are the simple facts:
The 1.5ºC target
In its 2018 Special Report, the IPCC recommended that, to achieve the Paris Agreement’s 1.5ºC target, global emissions should ‘decline by about 45% from 2010 levels by 2030’. In 2010 global CO2 emissions were 34.0 gigatonnes (Gt). Therefore they’d have to come down to 18.7 Gt by 2030 to meet the target. But, just three countries (China, the US and India) already exceed that(by 2.2 Gt) and all are likely to increase their emissions over the next five years – as are over 100 other countries. Therefore, if the IPCC has got it right, it’s clear that the Paris Agreement’s 1.5ºC target will be substantially exceeded.
The ‘well below’ 2ºC target
In the above report, the IPCC recommended that, to achieve the Paris Agreement’s ‘well below 2ºC’ target, global emissions should ‘decline by about 25% from 2010 levels by 2030’. As 2010 global CO2 emissions were 34.0 Gigatonnes (Gt), they’d have to come down to 25.5 Gt by 2030 to meet the target. But the emissions of just 8 countries (China, the USA, India, Russia, Iran, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and Mexico) already exceed 25.5 Gt and these countries are most unlikely to reduce their emissions over the next five years. Therefore, if the IPCC has got it right, warming of over 2ºC is essentially a certainty.
And that’s true even if over the next five years every other country in the world reduced its emissions to zero and shipping and aviation ceased altogether. Yet that’s quite obviously not going to happen – far from it.
References:
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2023/09/prevent-1-5-degrees-celsius-climate-threshold
https://unfccc.int/sites/default/files/english_paris_agreement.pdf
https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/spm
https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/report_2024?vis=co2tot#emissions_table
