The world is headed for significantly less warming than predicted a decade ago, but that good news is being overwhelmed by far more pain from current climate change than scientists expected, experts say.
That’s just one of the seemingly contradictory circumstances facing climate negotiators as they gather in Dubai this week for marathon United Nations talks that will assess for the first time how well the world is doing in its fight against global warming. It is also a conference where one of the central topics will be whether to phase out fossil fuels, but this will be led by the CEO of an oil company.
Key to the session is the first “global stocktake” of climate, in which countries will look at what has happened since the 2015 Paris climate agreement, how off track it is and likely say what it will take to get back on track come.
Even though emissions of heat-trapping gases are still rising every year, they were rising more slowly than expected between 2000 and 2015. Before the Paris deal, scientists from Climate Action Tracker and the United Nations Environment Program predicted around 3.5 degrees Celsius (6. 3 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming above pre-industrial levels, based on how much carbon dioxide countries emitted and what they planned to do about it.
That 3.5” is completely out of the picture. That won’t happen,” said Niklas Hohne, a scientist at the NewClimate Institute, who works on Climate Action Tracker. “Our number is 2.7 (4.9 degrees Fahrenheit). It could be even lower with pledges and net zero targets.”
UNEP’s emissions gap predicted 2.5 to 2.9 degrees (4.5 to 5.2 degrees Fahrenheit). The global target is 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).
Countries are showing promise and are even starting actions that should ultimately reduce emissions, but those cuts have not yet been realized, says Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics, also of Climate Action Tracker.
“So things are not as bad as they could have been or as we worried 20 years ago, but they are nowhere near where we need to be,” said climate scientist Rob Jackson of Stanford University, who leads scientists who conduct annual track world emissions in the Global Carbon Project.
Looking at the consequences of just 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming – on what the world has achieved so far – Ani Dasgupta, CEO of the World Resources Institute, said he wants to shout from the rooftops about how ‘unfair and unequal are the desolations’. is.”
“No one with half a brain can be happy where we are,” Dasgupta said.
For decades, scientists underestimated how much destruction a little warming would cause, several scientists say. And that damage we feel far outweighs the gains in reducing future warming projections, they said.
Hare points to more than 60,000 heat deaths in Europe in 2022. Others point to thousands of deaths from floods in Pakistan and Libya.
“The more we know, the more severe the consequences we see with lower temperature changes,” said Anne Olhoff, lead author of the UNEP Emissions Gap report. “The impact is happening much faster than we previously thought and much harder than we previously thought.”
The damage the world is seeing “is scarier than anything to me,” Jackson said. “We see things starting to unravel in the world again and there is no evidence that that will stop.”
When it comes to emissions, the key is what causes them, experts say, citing fossil fuels.
“I rightly think that the fundamental role of fossil fuels will be central” to the negotiations in Dubai, dubbed “COP” for the conference of parties, said Melanie Robinson, climate director of the World Resources Institute.
Heading into the negotiations, world leaders have been fretting over tentative agreements to triple renewable energy use and double energy efficiency. But that’s not enough, says Johan Rockstrom, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research.
“It requires breaking out the poisoned root of the climate crisis: fossil fuels,” said United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.
Guterres, numerous climate scientists and environmentalists all say what is needed is a phase-out – or at least a phase-out – of coal, oil and gas.
But the host country leads the negotiations and appoints a president. The host country is the oil state United Arab Emirates and has appointed Sultan al-Jaber, CEO of oil company ADNOC, who also runs a renewable energy company, as president of the conference. Al-Jaber and his colleagues say that by bringing fossil fuel companies to the table, they can get more done and it may take someone from the industry to get the necessary concessions.
Environmentalists don’t believe it.
“We cannot trust these politicians, and we cannot trust the processes of the COPs, because the fossil fuel industry is tightening their grip on their processes and dictating their outcomes,” said youth environmental activist Greta Thunberg.
The process is in the hands of parties or nations and because of COP rules it must be by consensus or near-unanimity, so a phase-out of the fossil fuel agreement is unlikely, but a “fossil fuel phase-out is inevitable. said Adnan Amir, the UAE’s No. 2 official for the climate talks.
“There are many different views on the fossil fuel language from many different parties and exactly how we will achieve this will be about how we get the wording right,” said COP28 Director General Majid Al Suwaidi. “I think the sentiment is all the same. The language we see here between the parties is really much closer than we have seen in the past.”
Hohne of the New Climate Institute said a phase-out is necessary, but doesn’t think Al Jaber will allow it: “He would have to agree in principle that the foundation of his company’s business model would be eliminated.”
Hohne, Hare, Dasgupta and others look at al-Jaber and others’ vigorous promotion of carbon capture and storage — technology that scientists say has not yet been proven — and they worry that the climate talks will look like as if something important has been achieved when in fact that is not the case.
“I think there is a big risk that the negotiations will turn into greenwashing, where it just looks nice but doesn’t deliver much,” Hohne said.
Activists and even United Nations officials also said they are alarmed by countries touting their efforts to reduce coal and increase renewable energy while also approving new oil and gas drilling projects, especially after Russia invaded Ukraine.
A report from the activist Center for Biological Diversity said that while new efforts by the Biden administration in its Inflation Reduction Act would reduce nearly 1 billion metric tons of CO2 emissions by 2030, 17 different oil and gas projects it approved would reduce 1.6 billion tons of CO2 emissions. tons of emissions.
“Governments cannot continue to promise to reduce emissions reduction commitments under the Paris Agreement and then greenlight major fossil fuel projects,” said UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen. “This calls into question the global energy transition and the future of humanity.”
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