The achievement of the Paris Climate Agreement mitigation plans submitted to date by 163 different countries would still lead to a 3° Celsius temperature rise by 2100, according to the UN.
What that means is that the plans that have been proposed to date (which are often not even on track to being achieved) are not even sufficient for achieving the goal of limiting warming to less than 2° Celsius (by 2100) — a goal which is considered by many observers to be insufficient if industrial civilization is to be maintained.
With natural disasters — whether wildfires, droughts, heatwaves, or hurricanes — seemingly becoming increasingly intense and common in recent years, it’s a necessity that countries “urgently” increase their efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, UN officials stated.
The spokesman for the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, Nicholas Nuttall, noted that this isn’t truly surprising since the plans delivered by various counties ahead of the Paris climate talks “were well known at the time to fall short of the Paris Agreement’s long-term goals.”
The Paris agreement does call for countries to “take stock” of international progress towards climate change mitigation periodically and to respond accordingly — with the first such “stock taking” slated for 2018 (with new plans due in 2020).
“That will, if followed, eventually get the world on track to the goals and the aim of climate neutrality in the second half of the century,” Nuttall argued. “The UN climate conference in Bonn … needs to be a launch pad to that next ambition moment.”
Reuters provides more: “But time is short, with global emissions of climate changing gases needing to peak by 2020 — just three years away — in order to keep warming to relatively safe levels, according to the World Resources Institute.
“Many developing country plans to curb emissions and adapt to climate change depend on receiving enough finance to implement them. Wealthy countries have pledged to raise $100 billion a year in climate finance by 2020, to help developing countries cope with the impacts of climate change and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
“But more than $4 trillion is needed for developing countries to implement their plans, according to the Least Developed Countries (LDC) Group which represents the world’s poorest 47 countries.
“‘LDCs and other developing countries cannot take ambitious action to address climate change or protect themselves against its impacts unless all countries fulfil and outdo the pledges they have made,’ commented Gebru Jember Endalew, the Ethiopian chair of the group. ‘(We) face the unique and unprecedented challenge of lifting our people out of poverty and achieving sustainable development without relying on fossil fuels.’”
Perhaps an impossible goal, all things considered — that is, impossible without utilizing systems very different to the ones that most of the modern world is based around the use of.
It’d probably be prudent at this point for most countries to be working towards negative population growth and greatly reduced resource consumption as the primary means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The sales pitch of a world of 7.5 billion people all living the western consumerist lifestyle was never really anything but a pipe dream meant to aid various organizations and corporations in the looting of the third world.
Source: cleantechnica.com
