New scenarios show how the world could limit warming to 1-5c in 2100

In the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, nearly every country on Earth pledged to keeping global temperatures “well below” 2C above pre-industrial levels and to “pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5C”.

However, at the time, scientists had only modelled energy system and carbon mitigation pathways to achieve the 2C target. Few studies had examined how the world might limit warming to 1.5C.

Now a paper in Nature Climate Change presents the results from a new modelling exercise using six different “integrated assessment models” (IAMs) to limit global temperatures in 2100 to below 1.5C.

The results suggest that 1.5C is achievable if global emissions peak in the next few years and massive amounts of carbon are sucked out of the atmosphere in the second half of the century through a proposed technology known as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS).

Read the RenewEconomy story by Zeke Hausfather - “New scenarios show how the world could limit warming to 1-5c in 2100.”

Earth on the edge: Record breaking 2016 was close to 1.5°C warming

The first global analysis of the whole of 2016 has confirmed last year as the warmest on record and saw the planet near a 1.5°C warming, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S).

The latest figures from C3S, part of the EU’s Copernicus earth observation programme, show that 2016’s global temperature exceeded 14.8°C, and was around 1.3°C higher than typical for the middle years of the 18th century. 2016 was close to 0.2°C warmer than 2015, which was previously the warmest year on record. 

Countries agreed in Paris in 2015 to holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels, recognizing that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change.

Read the Coperincus report - “Earth on the edge: Record breaking 2016 was close to 1.5°C warming.”

Emission cuts will be 'too little, too late' - it's time for a war-footing

Professor Jim Skea.

The analogy of a “war footing” is frequently used to explain how the world needs to respond to climate change.

However, quite the reverse is happening with ideological debates taking us deeper into an abyss to make it increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to see the earth return to a state in which humans, and other species, can prosper.

Humanity appears addicted to the prevailing carbon intensive way of life that is simply worsening emissions every month and edging us closer to catastrophic climate change.

Some claim that proposed changes are bold and will keep us below the agreed two degree pre-industrial limit (at even less than one degree, the world’s climate is changing faster than ever anticipated), but in fact they a wholly inadequate and in reality timid.

One who agrees with that is the vice-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Professor Jim Skea, who is quoted in a Climate Progress story headed: “IPCC Official Says Europe’s Planned 2030 Emission Cuts Would Be ‘Too Little Too Late’”.

Global warming and extreme railfall events linked

Global warming and its measurable link to extreme rainfall events has been discussed in the latest edition of The Conversation.

University of Adelaide senior lecturer at the School of Civil, Environmental and Mining Engineering, Seth Westra, explores the link in a story headed: “Increases in rainfall extremes linked to global warming”.

Mr. Westra said: “Rainfall extremes are increasing around the world, and the increase is linked to the warming of the atmosphere which has taken place since pre-industrial times.

“This is the conclusion of a recent study investigated extreme rainfall trends using data from 8326 weather-recording stations globally, some of which have records spanning more than a hundred years,” he wrote.