WaPo Editorial Board: No one should want their children to live in this 'bleak' future
LBN thread: UN Chief Warns Of 'Point Of No Return' On Climate Change
______________________________________________________________________
Source: Washington Post
No one should want their children to live in this ‘bleak’ future
By Editorial Board
12/1/2019, 6:29:37 p.m.
THE U.N. Environment Program released its latest report last week on where we are and where we need to be on addressing climate change. The word the authors chose to describe humanity’s future: “bleak.”
“Countries collectively failed to stop the growth in global [greenhouse gas] emissions, meaning that deeper and faster cuts are now required,” the report found. The hope that global emissions of heat-trapping gases might level out with the increasing use of natural gas in the United States and energy intensity improvements in China turned out to be too optimistic. After temporarily leveling out, emissions continued their rise. That includes in the United States, where Republicans’ various excuses for inaction — such as that the natural gas boom showed that government policy was unnecessary to cut emissions — ring more hollow than ever.
By the end of the next decade, greenhouse emissions must be a quarter lower than they were last year to enable humanity to keep the world below 2 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100. Otherwise, the only option to avoid breaching that threshold would be an extremely expensive crash decarbonization program. To keep the world below 1.5 degrees would require cutting emissions by more than half by 2030.
“Had serious climate action begun in 2010, the cuts required per year to meet the projected emissions levels for 2°C and 1.5°C would only have been 0.7 per cent and 3.3 per cent per year on average,” the authors found. “However, since this did not happen, the required cuts in emissions are now 2.7 per cent per year from 2020 for the 2°C goal and 7.6 per cent per year on average for the 1.5°C goal.”
Meeting either target would require much more effort than countries pledged at the 2015 Paris climate conference. If nations met their Paris commitments — hardly a given as major emitters such as Australia, Brazil, Japan and the United States fall behind — that would give the world a 66 percent chance of limiting warming to 3 degrees Celsius by 2100.
-snip-
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/no-one-should-want-their-children-to-live-in-this-bleak-future/2019/12/01/70771a84-1159-11ea-b0fc-62cc38411ebb_story.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
