Climate On Track to Warm at Least 3 Degrees Without Action

(Bloomberg) -- The world is on track to warm by almost 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, double the rate scientists have identified as needed to constrain the worst impacts of climate change.

The latest data from Climate Tracker show that even under the current national pledges to slow global warming, the Earth’s temperature will warm by 2.8 degrees by 2100. The projections are yet another piece of bad news for the environmental movement and the thousands of delegates in Madrid this week debating over how the Paris Agreement should look.

At 3 degrees of warming, many glaciers and ice caps melt, boosting sea levels rise and engulfing low areas. Deserts would grow and storms would become more violent, leaving more areas uninhabitable. Envoys from almost 200 countries at COP25 meeting organized by the United Nations are trying to unlock technical but vital market mechanisms that if implemented properly could unleash billions of dollars aimed at slashing emissions.

The research is aimed at drawing attention to the solutions for reining in emissions, including ways to channel more funds to renewables and less to fossil fuels. While the U.S. and Europe are phasing out coal as a power generation fuel, natural gas use is growing and contributing to higher emissions.

“Gas is a major concern,” said Bill Hare, chief executive officer of Climate Analytics. “Governments are acting as if this fossil fuel is somehow clean. Yet gas was responsible for half the increase in CO2 emissions from fossil fuel consumption in 2017-18.”

Climate Tracker is a scientific consortium composed of climate advisers and consultants. Their results are on the lower end of a new scale published last week by the World Meteorological Organization, which forecast temperatures could rise as much as 5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.

While those readings wouldn’t register over the course of a week or two, 1 degree Celsius of warming already recorded since the start of the industrial revolution represents the quickest shift in the climate since the last ice age ended some 10,000 years ago.

In order to get anywhere near the 1.5 degree Celsius warming, emissions should peak before 2030 and be only a small part of the global electricity mix by the middle of the century, Hare said.

To contact the reporters on this story: Jeremy Hodges in London at jhodges17@bloomberg.net;Demetrios Pogkas in London at dpogkas@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Reed Landberg at landberg@bloomberg.net, Jonathan Tirone

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