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'We're Playing With Fire': World on Track for 'Catastrophic' 3.1°C of Warming
"Closing the emissions gap means closing the ambition gap, the implementation gap, and the finance gap," said U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres. "Starting at COP29."
Oct 24, 2024
The world's nations must commit to dramatically slashing greenhouse gas emissions in the near future or risk a "catastrophic" rise in global average temperatures, a key United Nations climate report published Thursday warned.
"It is still technically possible to meet the 1.5°C goal" set out in the Paris agreement, "but only with a G20-led massive global mobilization to cut all greenhouse gas emissions, starting today," the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) said in a summary of its annual Emissions Gap Report.
"Nations must collectively commit to cutting 42% off annual greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and 57% by 2035 in the next round of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs)—and back this up with rapid action—or the Paris agreement's 1.5°C goal will be gone within a few years," UNEP warned.
"Failure to increase ambition in these new NDCs and start delivering immediately would put the world on course for a temperature increase of 2.6-3.1°C over this century," the agency said. "This would bring debilitating impacts to people, planet, and economies."
UNEP said "solar, wind, and forests" have the potential to help the world "get on a 1.5°C pathway." However, "sufficiently strong NDCs would need to be backed urgently by a whole-of-government approach, measures that maximize socioeconomic and environmental co-benefits, enhanced international collaboration that includes reform of the global financial architecture, strong private sector action, and a minimum six-fold increase in mitigation investment."
"G20 nations, particularly the largest-emitting members, would need to do the heavy lifting," the agency added.
The task is daunting—according to the report, human emissions of greenhouse gases—CO2, methane, nitrous oxide, and fluorinated gases—reached a record 57.1bn tons of CO2 equivalent (GtCO2e) last year.
"The emissions gap is not an abstract notion," U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres stressed in a video message on the UNEP report. "There is a direct link between increasing emissions and increasingly frequent and intense climate disasters."
"Around the world, people are paying a terrible price," he continued. "Record emissions mean record sea temperatures supercharging monster hurricanes; record heat is turning forests into tinder boxes and cities into saunas; record rains are resulting in biblical floods."
"Today's Emissions Gap report is clear: We're playing with fire; but there can be no more playing for time," Guterres added. "We're out of time. Closing the emissions gap means closing the ambition gap, the implementation gap, and the finance gap. Starting at COP29."
The U.N. chief was referring to the United Nations Climate Change Conference, which is set to take place next month in Baku, Azerbaijan—a nation that is "aggressively" expanding fossil fuel production.
UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen said in a statement:
Climate crunch time is here. We need global mobilization on a scale and pace never seen before—starting right now, before the next round of climate pledges—or the 1.5°C goal will soon be dead and well below 2°C will take its place in the intensive care unit. I urge every nation: No more hot air, please. Use the upcoming COP29 talks in Baku, Azerbaijan, to increase action now, set the stage for stronger NDCs, and then go all-out to get on a 1.5°C pathway.
Even if the world overshoots 1.5°C—and the chances of this happening are increasing every day—we must keep striving for a net-zero, sustainable, and prosperous world. Every fraction of a degree avoided counts in terms of lives saved, economies protected, damages avoided, biodiversity conserved, and the ability to rapidly bring down any temperature overshoot.
Climate scientists and green groups expressed alarm over the UNEP report.
"The Emissions Gap Report is yet another clear warning about what needs to be done and fast," Andreas Sieber, associate director of policy and campaigns at 350.org, said in a statement. "Last year at COP28, nations agreed to transition away from fossil fuels. The report makes it crystal clear that governments must translate this decision into action in their national climate pledges if they are serious about the just energy transition."
Greenpeace International climate politics expert Tracy Carty said that "for 15 years, the UNEP has been sounding the alarm on the great chasm between political will for climate action and the worsening emissions trajectory fuelling rising temperatures."
"These reports are a historical litany of negligence from the world's leaders to tackle the climate crisis with the urgency it demands, but it's not too late to take corrective action," Carty continued. "We challenge leaders to embark on wholesale change in their 2035 climate plans, to come to COP29 prepared to finance climate action and to make up for lost time."
Rachel Cleetus, policy director and a lead economist in the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, issued a statement arguing that the new UNEP report "forcefully confirms that nations' efforts to cut heat-trapping emissions have been grossly insufficient to date."
"Global heating records are being topped year after year, and people and ecosystems worldwide are suffering the devastation of unrelenting climate change disasters and increasingly irreversible impacts," she noted. "To put it bluntly, decades of inadequate action have put the 1.5°C goal further out of reach and world leaders are failing their people. The consequences are profound—but the policy choices decided now are as crucial as ever to limit future harm."
Cleetus continued:
The best way forward is to implement sweeping changes to the global energy system by phasing out the destructive products fossil fuel companies are peddling and investing big in renewable energy solutions to sharply curtail heat-trapping emissions. Also urgent are scaled-up investments in climate resilience to cope with impacts already locked in. Rich, high-emitting nations—including the United States—are most responsible for these calamitous circumstances. Those living in climate-vulnerable, low-income countries that contributed very little to the fossil fuel pollution driving this crisis need more than hollow words; they need wealthy countries and other major emitters to live up to their responsibilities.
"At the upcoming U.N. climate talks, wealthy nations must significantly grow the amount of climate financing available to ensure all countries can slash their global warming emissions and prepare for the more frequent and severe climate impacts that are the punishing consequence of a warming world," Cleetus added.
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Climate Campaigners Celebrate Cancellation of Multistate Carbon Capture Pipeline
"Cause of death: citizen activism informed by science."
Oct 20, 2023
Climate action advocates and scientists joined residents of five Midwestern states in applauding Friday after a Nebraska firm canceled plans to build a carbon pipeline, following outcry from the public and opponents of "dangerous, wasteful" carbon capture schemes.
Navigator CO2 Ventures said it was abandoning plans to build the $3.5 billion, 1,300-mile Heartland Greenway pipeline project—whose backers included investment firm BlackRock and Valero Energy—after South Dakota regulators denied a permit.
The company cited "the unpredictable nature of the regulatory and government processes involved," but advocates in the five states that would have been affected credited grassroots campaigning, including by residents who spoke out against the company's plan to potentially use eminent domain to gain access to land.
"As soon as Iowans learned about CO2 pipelines we knew these were not pipelines we wanted in our communities," said Susan and Jerry Stoefen, members of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement. "Iowans organized to be heard: 'No CO2 Pipelines, No Eminent Domain!' Now is the time for Iowans to find reals solutions to reducing CO2 emissions that don't degrade our land, water, and air."
One Iowa resident summed up the victory as, "A bunch of elderly farmers without internet just took down BlackRock."
Along with Iowa and Nebraska, the pipeline would have cut through parts of South Dakota, Minnesota, and Illinois, where Navigator CO2 planned to store liquefied carbon deep underground after capturing it and transporting it from 18 ethanol plants owned by Poet, the world's largest ethanol producer, and Iowa Fertilizer Company.
The company is one of three firms that have planned to build carbon capture pipelines in the Midwest, promoting what climate advocates and scientists have decried as an energy-intensive, unproven false solution that diverts focus away from efforts to slash fossil fuel emissions and transition to renewable energy.
Summit Carbon Solutions and Wolf Carbon Solutions also have pipeline proposals, but Summit announced Thursday it was delaying construction of its $5.5 billion project by two years until 2026, citing permit denials similar to Navigator's.
U.S. President Joe Biden has made carbon capture a focus of his climate plans, announcing an investment of up to $1.2 billion for two major direct-air carbon capture facilities in Texas and Louisiana earlier this year.
"While the federal government keeps trying to waste billions of dollars to promote these massive carbon pipelines, grassroots organizing is winning the fight to stop these egregious handouts to corporate polluters," said Emily Wurth, managing director of organizing for Food & Water Watch. "These carbon pipelines will not reduce emissions—they are dangerous, wasteful schemes to prolong and expand polluting industries. Instead of throwing away money supporting polluters, the government should invest in proven clean energy solutions, not carbon capture pipe dreams."
In addition to warning that carbon capture is a false solution to the climate crisis, critics warned that a rupture of a pipeline carrying highly pressurized CO2—an asphyxiant—could pose a major public health threat to nearby communities, as one accident did in the town of Sartartia, Mississippi in 2021.
Both Summit and Navigator initially warned residents living in areas that would be affected by the pipelines that they could resort to eminent domain—a legal process by which companies can gain access to land when a landowner refuses to grant it—and Summit has already pursued dozens of eminent domain orders for its proposed pipeline.
Although Navigator has not yet pursued the actions, the company's vice president of government and public affairs, Elizabeth Burns-Thompson, said at a public debate in August that it couldn't guarantee eminent domain wouldn't be used to complete Heartland Greenway.
Biologist Sandra Steingraber, a vocal critic of carbon capture schemes, celebrated the demise of the proposed pipeline, whose "cause of death," she said, was "citizen activism informed by science."
"Piping pressurized supercritical CO2 all over creation," said Steingraber, "endangers people, destroys farmland, [and] does nothing meaningful for the climate."
Earlier this month, Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Jesús "Chuy" García (D-Ill.) led a call for Biden to place a moratorium on federal permitting for CO2 pipelines, citing public health concerns.
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Surging Atmospheric CO2 Hits Level Unseen in Millions of Years
The only way to stop this march to a fully tropical globe is to stop burning gasoline and diesel in our vehicles, and to stop generating electricity and heating our homes with coal and fossil gas.
Jun 07, 2023
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced Monday that parts per million of carbon dioxide in our planet’s atmosphere averaged 424 ppm in the month of May, reaching a level not seen for millions of years. In May 2022 it was only 421 ppm so this is a tremendous jump on a year over year basis. It probably reflects the resurgence of the world economy as the COVID pandemic has transitioned to an endemic infection and governments have dropped most prophylactic measures.
NOAA administrator Dr. Rich Spinrad observed, “Every year we see carbon dioxide levels in our atmosphere increase as a direct result of human activity. Every year, we see the impacts of climate change in the heat waves, droughts, flooding, wildfires and storms happening all around us. While we will have to adapt to the climate impacts we cannot avoid, we must expend every effort to slash carbon pollution and safeguard this planet and the life that calls it home.”
Carbon dioxide is a potent greenhouse gas which prevents the heat of the sun’s rays from radiating back out into outer space through the atmosphere at the same rate they used to before the industrial revolution. Keeping more heat on earth means hotter oceans and more powerful hurricanes and cyclones, along with hotter air and more desiccation of soil and forests, leading to more wildfires. Those newly common wildfires in Canada are now blanketing the US Midwest and Northeast with heavy smog.
The only way to stop this march to a fully tropical globe is to stop burning gasoline and diesel in our vehicles, and to stop generating electricity and heating our homes with coal and fossil gas.
The Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego partnered with NOAA, taking its own measurements at Mauna Loa, and found virtually the same concentrations of CO2 and the same huge leap since last year this time.
Civilization has never faced such a high average temperature of the earth’s surface, which is a direct result of the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Scripps Oceanography geoscientist Ralph Keeling is in charge of the Keeling curve created by his father in the late 1950s.He remarked, “Sadly we’re setting a new record. What we’d like to see is the curve plateauing and even falling because carbon dioxide as high as 420 or 425 parts per million is not good. It shows as much as we’ve done to mitigate and reduce emissions, we still have a long way to go.”
The Scripps site notes that carbon dioxide levels are more than 50% higher than they were in 1750 before the steam engine and the Industrial Revolution. There was then about 280 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere and it was cold.
Here is the scary part. Human civilization is only about 5,000 to 6,000 years old, characterized by the emergence of cities and role differentiation such that not everyone had to farm– there was room for blacksmiths and tinsmiths and merchants and astronomers and story-tellers. People learned to read and write, to record discoveries and pass them on to the next generation. Elam in Iran and Sumer in southern Iraq were among the earliest such civilizations.
From that time to this, there were just about 280 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It sometimes fell a little or rose a little but it stayed in that range.
We don’t know if a world of 424 ppm CO2 is compatible with civilization. Civilization has never faced such a high average temperature of the earth’s surface, which is a direct result of the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Intense hurricanes that flatten electric and telecommunications lines time and again (see: Puerto Rico) could be hard on civilization. Flooding of our major coastal ports could likewise be rather a peril. What if the New York Public library is inundated?
As Dr. Keeler said, this wasn’t the outcome we expected this year, and it is not the direction in which we want the planet to go.
The last time there was this much CO2 up there was the Pliocene, roughly 3-4 million years ago.
I have observed,
“Temperatures in the middle Pliocene were on average 2-3 degrees C. (3.6 – 5.8 degrees F.) higher than today. The Arctic was 10 degrees C. hotter than today’s. Seas were roughly 90 feet higher. Some places now wet were desert-like. See this link for what would happen to five cities under this scenario.
This 90 feet sea level rise is therefore almost certainly baked in and will occur, over the next few hundred years (oceans are huge and cold and take time to warm up). I wouldn’t buy real estate in Miami or lower Manhattan with an idea of passing it on to your grandchildren. Any beachfront property is ephemeral.
The cycles of drought and monsoon flooding were extreme in the west of North America during the Middle Pliocene, and we are already seeing some evidence of this deadly one-two punch in California in the twenty-first century.
And Florida was underwater in the middle Pliocene.
The good thing is that some of the worst consequences of climate change can still be avoided, if we make a major push to get our energy from solar panels and wind turbines and to electrify our transportation.
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