For the world to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, the 200 countries who signed the Paris climate agreement must hit a target of 43% reduction by 2030. Yet according to a recent report by the United Nations agency tasked with tackling global warming, the planet is currently on track to just hit a measly 2.6% reduction in carbon emissions.
The agency in question, UN Climate Change, analyzed the carbon cutting plans as submitted by the almost 200 countries involved in the 2015 accord. If they do not significantly accelerate their carbon reduction plans, it will be impossible to keep the planet’s total warming below 1.5º C hotter than pre-industrial levels.
“The report’s findings are stark but not surprising,” Simon Stiell, executive secretary of UN Climate Change, told the BBC. “Current national climate plans fall miles short of what’s needed to stop global heating from crippling every economy, and wrecking billions of lives and livelihoods across every country.”
Some scientists have already written off the possibility of keeping global warming under that pre-industrial threshold. The authors of an August study in the journal Nature Climate Change determined that 1.6º C above pre-industrial levels is the best humanity can realistically achieve at this point.
"Accelerated energy demand transformation can reduce costs for staying below 2º C but have only a limited impact on further increasing the likelihood of limiting warming to 1.6° C," the authors wrote, referring to an eventual transition to carbon neutral energy technologies.
"A year above 1.5C is unprecedented in human history," Dr. Ken Caldeira, an atmospheric scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science's Department of Global Ecology, told Salon at the time. "Nevertheless, it is important to remember that each carbon dioxide emission causes another increment of global warming and so each emission avoided is an increment of global warming avoided."
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