Efforts leading to climate actions and dialogues have helped trim a few tenths of a degree off future warming, but still far from reaching the international goals, according to an analysis by an authoritative independent group of scientists.
Climate Action Tracker, which has for years monitored countries’ emission cutting pledges said, given the submitted targets, the world is now on track to warm 2.4 degree Celsius (4.3 degree Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times by the end of this century.
That’s simply a far cry from the 2015 Paris resolution to limit global heating to 1.5 degree Celsius or 2 degrees Celsius. The world has already warmed 1.1 to 1.2 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times, the group said.
Considering the pledges made “we are likely to be in that area 2.4 degrees, which is still catastrophic climate change and far, far away from the goals of the Paris Agreement,” said climate scientist Niklas Hohne of New Climate and the Climate Action Tracker.
The Independent group of Scientist also in their analysis found that in “the optimistic scenario” if all net-zero pledges for mid-century are taken into account- and they have little substance in them- warming would be 1.8 degrees.
UNEP says World leaders made ‘toddler steps’ in pledges
Similarly, an analysis conducted by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) concluded that the latest national climate pledges and UN talks in Glasgow only indicate “some serious toddler steps” toward cutting emissions but so far away from giant leaps needed to limit global warming to international targets.
Inger Andersen, UNEP’s Director said that the new analysis found that the commitments from world leaders were not enough to trim future warming scenarios and reduced the “emissions gap” by a few tenths of a percentage point.
The analysis finds that pledges from countries to curb emissions would cut 8 billion metric tons out of the 55 billion metric tons that need to be eliminated to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times. This is what will set the world on the path to meeting the 2015 Paris climate agreement.
“There’s some serious toddler steps,” Andersen said in an interview. “But they are not the leaps we need to see by any stretch of the imagination.”
Inger Andersen acknowledged that none of the three main UN goals for the two-week climate talks have been achieved so far: cutting greenhouse gas emissions by about half by 2030; securing US$100 billion a year in aid from rich countries to poor nations because of climate change; and having half of that money go for developing nations to adapt to global warming’s worst harms.
“No, we’re not done yet. We still have a couple of days,” Andersen said. “And so we’re certain from our side, from the United Nations side, we’re going to try to hold everyone’s feet to the fire.”
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