The introduction to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) report this week was blunt. It read: “The chance of holding global warming to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels with no or limited overshoot – a key target of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change – is now gone.”
The best hope the report can offer is limiting the overshoot as fast as possible, bringing temperatures back to the 1.5 degree limit by 2100. This news is shocking but not surprising; it conforms to a trend that has become increasingly obvious.
Even with the lowest possible overshoot – extremely difficult to achieve in the best of all possible political worlds, let alone the one we actually inhabit today – the consequences will be dire.
“Every year spent in a warmer world raises the risk of irreversible damage to the planetary systems that sustain us,” says Anne Olhoff, the director of the UNEP-Copenhagen Climate Centre. “Unless we quickly cut greenhouse gas emissions, our best chance for avoiding a full-blown climate catastrophe will disappear in the rearview mirror”.
The quick cutting of greenhouse gas emissions, however, is far from high on international agendas, just as we approach the 31st UN Conference of the Parties (COP) on climate change in Turkey next month. Ireland’s recent budget went in the opposite direction with its retreat on carbon taxes, while the EU budget proposed by the Irish presidency also proposes cuts to climate mitigation measures. As for the US, it has rejected the Paris Treaty altogether under Donald Trump.
It is troubling that the other major measure UNEP proposes for lowering the inevitable overshoot in heating is the re-capture and storage of carbon from the atmosphere – a technological feat that we are not remotely close to achieving.
We have already seen the disastrous impacts of current global heating in terms of wildfires, flooding, droughts and heat deaths. The UNEP report makes it frighteningly clear that much, much worse awaits us unless there is a truly radical shift in humanity’s approach to this existential issue.