Climate change is inevitable

[Kristoffer, 12-5-2023, Inside Climate News, “At COP28, More and More Scientists Say Overshooting 1.5 Degrees Is ‘Inevitable’,” https://insideclimatenews.org/news/05122023/todays-climate-cop28-scientists-say-overshooting-1-5-degrees-is-inevitable/#:~:text=Their%20main%20finding%2C%20they%20said,expand%20their%20plans%20to%20build, accessed 7-10-2024, CM]

But out of the public’s eye, many top climate diplomats and leading scientists have believed for years that the chance of achieving 1.5 degrees of warming is slim to nothing. The planet has already warmed about 1.3 degrees, and a growing number of researchers and thought leaders in the climate movement are now stating that belief bluntly as negotiations begin in earnest at the U.N. climate conference.

At a COP28 panel held Sunday, some of the world’s leading climate institutions unveiled their latest report, breaking down key scientific findings into digestible highlights for negotiators at the summit. Their main finding, they said, was that progress to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions has been “so limited,” that overshooting the 1.5 degrees target is “inevitable” and could be permanent without radically changing almost every aspect of modern society—an unlikely outcome as nations expand their plans to build fossil fuel infrastructure to extract more oil and gas than ever before.

“We’re talking, at best … up to 1.8 degrees Celsius before returning back to 1.5 by the end of this century,” said panelist Johan Rockstrom, director of the Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact Research. “To return back to 1.5 by the end of the century requires that we do everything right: phasing out fossil fuels, transforming the global food system, maintaining all the carbon sinks and stocks on land and in the ocean, and scaling carbon dioxide removal. Everything has to happen simultaneously.”

Nearly 37 billion metric tons of CO2 was released last year, according to the International Energy Agency. At that rate, nations can emit just six-years-worth of additional CO2—250 billion tons in total—before 1.5 degrees is completely out of the question, Rockstrom said. Even if that goal is met, he added, it leaves just a 50 percent chance that temperatures can be brought back down to the 1.5 degrees threshold by the end of the century.

The report reiterates a similar finding by the U.N. Environment Programme, which said in its Emissions Gap Report last year that there is “no credible pathway to 1.5°C in place,” and that “only an urgent system-wide transformation can avoid climate disaster.” A study published last month and led by James Hansen, the scientist who first warned Congress of the climate crisis in the late ‘80s, projects that the planet will likely warm 2 degrees—at least temporarily—sometime in the next few decades. And Bill Gates, the billionaire tech mogul and one of the world’s biggest investors in clean energy, said in an interview this weekend in Dubai that he believes it “isn’t that likely” the world will even meet the Paris Agreement’s less ambitious goal of permanently keeping temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius.