World temperatures could spike more than twice the globally agreed warming limit, risking a climate disaster — after greenhouse gas emissions surged to a record level last year, according to a new UN report.
The ominous findings were announced Tuesday in the “Emissions Gap Report,” one of several studies released ahead of UN climate talks in Madrid next week aimed at spurring world leaders to limit climate change.
“We are failing to curb greenhouse gas emissions,” Inger Andersen, who heads the UN Environment Program, told Agence France-Presse.
“Unless we take urgent action now and make very significant cuts to global emissions we’re going to miss the target of 1.5 (Celsius),” she said, referring to the need to limit global temperature rises to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit above pre-industrial levels, as agreed in the 2015 Paris Agreement.
“We need quick wins to reduce emissions as much as possible in 2020,” Andersen said.
In the coming decade, global emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases will have to drop more than 7 percent each year to stop average temperatures from increasing by more than 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit this century, the agency said.
Even the less ambitious goal of capping global warming at 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit would require annual emissions cuts of 2.7 percent between 2020 and 2030, the agency said.
“We need to catch up on the years in which we procrastinated,” Andersen said. “If we don’t do this, the (2.7F) goal will be out of reach before 2030.”
Current national pledges would leave the world 5.8 degrees Fahrenheit warmer by 2100 than pre-industrial times, with dramatic consequences for life on the planet, the agency said, adding that getting the world back on track to 2.7F would require a fivefold increase in measures pledged so far.
“Major societal and economic transformations need to take place in the next decade to make up for the inaction of the past,” it said, adding that these measures would need to include ending the use of fossil fuels in the energy, building and transportation sectors.
Last week, the UN agency published another report that found that countries are planning to extract more than twice the amount of fossil fuels from the ground than can be burned in 2030 if the 2.7-degree target is to be met.
“(What) countries are saying about supply doesn’t match up with what they’re saying about reducing emissions,” said the report’s co-author Michael Lazarus, a senior scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute.
This includes countries like the US which, despite announcing its withdrawal from the Paris accord, claims to be reducing emissions even as it expands oil and gas production.
Last year, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned of huge global changes if the target is not met — such as the loss of nearly all coral reefs and most Arctic sea ice.
“Being a grandfather, we don’t want to leave that for our grandkids,” the new report’s lead author John Christensen told a news conference.
With Post wires