World on track to get 1.8 degrees warmer without climate action, UN warns

The world is on track to get 1.8 degrees warmer than it is now, but could trim half a degree of that projected future heating if countries do everything they promise to fight climate change, a United Nations report said on Thursday.

But even with those changes it still won’t be near enough to curb the worst impacts of global warming, such as more volatile heat waves, wildfires, storms and droughts, the report said.

Under every scenario but the “most optimistic” with the biggest cuts in fossil fuels burning, the chance of curbing warming so it stays within the internationally agreed-upon limit “would be virtually zero,” the United Nations Environment Programme’s annual Emissions Gap Report said.

The goal, which was laid out in the 2015 Paris Agreement, is to limit human-caused warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times.

The report said that since the mid-1800s, the world has already increased in temperature by 1.3 degrees, up from previous estimates of 1.1 or 1.2 degrees because it includes the record heat last year.

Instead, the world is on track to hit 3.1 degrees since pre-industrial times, but that could be limited to 2.6 degrees if nations do manage to do everything they’ve promised across all of their climate commitments submitted to the UN.

In that scenario, where nations have zero net carbon emissions after mid-century, there’s a 23% chance of keeping warming at or below the 1.5 degrees goal.

“The main message is that action right now and right here before 2030 is critical if we want to lower the temperature,” the report’s main editor Anne Olhoff said. “It is now or never really if we want to keep 1.5 alive.”

Ms Olhoff said Earth is on a trajectory to abandon the 1.5 target sometime in 2029.

One of the problems is that even though nations pledged climate action in their targets submitted as part of the Paris Agreement, there is a big gap between what they said they would do and what they are doing based on their existing policies, report authors said.

The world’s 20 richest countries, which are responsible for 77% of the carbon pollution in the air, are falling short of their stated emission-cutting goals, with only 11 meeting their individual targets, the report said.

Emission cuts strong enough to limit warming to the 1.5 degree goal are more than technically and economically possible, the report found – they just aren’t being proposed or done.

The report focuses on what is called an emissions gap.

It calculates a budget of how many billions of tonnes of greenhouse gases, mostly carbon dioxide and methane, the world can produce while staying under 1.5 degrees, 1.8 degrees and 2 degrees of warming since pre-industrial times.

It then figures how much annual emissions have to be slashed by 2030 to keep at those levels.

To keep at or below 1.5 degrees, the world must slash emissions by 42%, and to keep at or below 2 degrees, the cut has to be 28%, the report, named, “No more hot air… please!” said.