{"id":1772,"date":"2018-10-02T16:21:08","date_gmt":"2018-10-02T16:21:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/euromenaenergy.com\/?p=1772"},"modified":"2018-10-02T16:21:08","modified_gmt":"2018-10-02T16:21:08","slug":"nations-face-tough-choices-on-climate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/?p=1772","title":{"rendered":"Nations face tough choices on climate"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

By Marlowe Hood\/ AFP Paris<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The world\u2019s nations will gather at a UN conference in South Korea today to review and approve a 20-page bombshell \u2013 distilled from more than 6,000 scientific studies \u2013 laying out narrowing options for staving off climate catastrophe.
\nWhen the 195 countries who signed off on the Paris Agreement in 2015 requested a report from UN-led scientists on the feasibility of capping global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius, the gesture seemed to many unnecessary.
\nThe treaty, after all, enjoined the world to block the rise in Earth\u2019s surface temperature at \u201cwell below\u201d 2C (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) compared to preindustrial levels, adding a safety buffer to the two degree threshold long seen as the guardrail for a climate-safe world.
\nSince then, however, a crescendo of deadly heatwaves, floods, wildfires and superstorms engorged by rising seas \u2013 with less than 1C warming so far \u2013 has convinced scientists that the danger cursor needed to be reset.
\n\u201cThere is increasing and very robust evidence of truly severe and catastrophic risks even at the lower bounds of these temperature targets,\u201d said Peter Frumhoff, director of science and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a Washington-based research and advocacy group.
\nThe promise of \u201cpursuing efforts\u201d to limit warming to 1.5C \u2013 added to the Paris treaty at the last minute, in part to assuage poor nations who felt short-changed on other fronts \u2013 caught scientists off-guard.
\n\u201cThere wasn\u2019t very much literature on 1.5C warming three years ago,\u201d said Jim Skea, a professor of at Imperial College London\u2019s Centre for Environmental Policy, and a co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC), the UN science body charged with writing the \u201cSpecial Report\u201d on 1.5C.
\nOf hundreds of climate models in 2015 projecting a low-carbon future, only two or three aimed for a 1.5C global warming cap.
\nThe 20-page Summary Policy Makers \u2013 which will be collectively scrutinised, line-by-line, by hundreds of diplomats through Friday \u2013 contains several benchmark findings, according to a draft obtained by AFP.
\nAt current levels of greenhouse gas emissions, for example, the Earth\u2019s surface will heat up beyond the 1.5C threshold by 2040, the report concludes with \u201chigh confidence\u201d.
\nTo have a fighting chance of staying under the 1.5C cap, the global economy must, by 2050, become \u201ccarbon neutral\u201d, meaning no additional CO2 can be allowed to leach into the atmosphere.
\nIn addition, the report suggests that carbon dioxide emissions from human activity will need to peak in 2020 and curve sharply downward from there.
\nSo far, we are still moving in the wrong direction: after remaining stable for three years \u2013 raising hopes the peak had come \u2013 emissions rose in 2017 to historic levels.
\nFor many scientists, these targets are technically feasible but politically or socially unrealistic, along with the broader 1.5C goal.
\n\u201cThe feasibility is probably going to remain an open question, even after the report comes out,\u201d said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University.
\nA main focus of the underlying, 400-page report \u2013 written by a team of 86 authors, supported by another 150 scientists \u2013 is the difference a half-degree Celsius can make in terms of impacts.
\n\u201cWhen we\u2019re talking about 1.5C it\u2019s not just to protect a few dozen small island nations,\u201d said Henri Waisman, a senior researcher at the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations, and a co-ordinating author of the report.
\n\u201cIt\u2019s to avoid dramatic impacts that become exponentially more dramatic when we go from 1.5C to 2C.\u201d
\nWhat used to be once-a-century heatwaves in southern and central Europe, for example, are projected to occur four out of 10 summers in a 1.5C world, and six out of ten in a 2C world.
\nMany tropical fisheries are likely to collapse somewhere between the 1.5C and 2C benchmark, as fish seek cooler waters; staple food crops will decline in yield and nutrition an extra 10 to 15%; coral reefs that may have a chance of surviving if air temperatures remain below 1.5C will very likely perish with an additional half-degree of warming.
\nMost worrying of all, perhaps, are temperature \u201ctipping points\u201d that could push methane-laden permafrost and the icesheets of Greenland and West Antarctica \u2013 which hold enough frozen water to lift global oceans by a dozen metres (nearly 40ft) \u2013 beyond the point of no return.
\nSome experts, however, worry that focusing on the contrast between a 1.5C and 2C world obscures the fact we are currently on a trajectory that will crash through both these thresholds.
\n\u201cI don\u2019t think 2C is safe, and I would never want to argue it,\u201d said Frumhoff. \u201cBy many measures, 1.5C is not enough.\u201d
\n\u201cBut while we might call 2C an upper bound, let\u2019s not pretend that we\u2019re on a 2C path \u2013 we are way above that,\u201d he told AFP.
\nEven taking into account voluntary national pledges to cut greenhouse gas emissions, submitted in annex to the Paris treaty, the Earth is on track to heat up by an unliveable 3.5C or more by century\u2019s end.
\n\u201cIf we want to save ourselves from the disasters that are looming, we only have unrealistic options left,\u201d said Kaisa Kosonen, Greenpeace IPPC campaign lead.
\n\u201cWe have to try to make the impossible possible.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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