The energy mix website continues following another post on the UNEP report published this week that reflects tension between accepting that 1.5°C will be exceeded and rejecting the idea that this means giving up. We simply can’t give up.
‘Call to Apathy, Not to Arms’ as UN Warns Climate Overshoot Is Inevitable, Downplays Fossil Phaseout
A leading United Nations agency stands accused of issuing a “call to apathy, not to arms”, with a report that confirms humanity will overshoot the 1.5°C global warming threshold in the 2015 Paris climate agreement but understates the potential to phase out fossil fuels and bring emissions to net-zero by 2050, independent analysts say.
On Wednesday, the UN Environment Programme issued what The Associated Press calls a “strategic retreat in the fight against climate change,” acknowledging that Earth has lost its chance to prevent some of the worst of global warming’s harms. Now, the news agency says, the world must figure out how to get temperatures below the danger zone and back to safety, officials say.
Earth will soon exceed the safe temperature threshold countries agreed upon in the 2015 Paris climate accord because of warming from the burning of coal, oil, and gas, according to a bleak, first-of-its-kind report issued Wednesday.
Instead of giving up, scientists and UN officials recommend trying to limit excessive warming and then bring the temperature back down to the agreed-upon threshold. But it still will mean decades of increased weather-related disasters, rising seas, extinctions, and melting ice and glaciers.
“Humanity is speeding past the limit to avoid climate catastrophe,” United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said.
After a period of over-the-limit warming, the new strategy envisions getting back below the limit by ending fossil fuel use and developing some kind of way to suck industries’ carbon pollution out of the air.
“It’s a reality check. We have to live with this warmer world,” said report co-author Richard Betts, a climate scientist at the University of Exeter. “But there’s still a lot we can do to limit warming.”
Missing the Solutions
Berlin-based Climate Analytics agreed with the UN’s assessment of the problem, but warned that the report fails to properly address the solutions to the climate emergency.
“Although UNEP does a good job of describing the hole we’ve dug ourselves into, it does a poor job of showing us that there is a way out,” CEO Bill Hare said in a release. “Ultimately, the report’s neglect of some fundamentally important mitigation analysis risks turning it into a call to apathy rather than a call to arms.”
CBC inadvertently bore out that analysis by writing its own headline for the AP coverage of the report: “Climate change past the point of no return, UN says, as worst impacts are now unavoidable.”
Climate Analytics said the report:
- Includes just one mention of the need for a fossil fuel phaseout, and no word at all on the transition away from fossil fuels initiated by more than 50 countries during last year’s COP30 climate summit in Brazil;
- “Sidelines” analysis showing that many sectors of the economy can reach net-zero by 2050, and immediate emission reductions now will still allow time to halt global warming by 2050 and “bring it back well below 1.5°C by the end of the century”;
- Fails to remind government to honour their commitments under the Paris agreement and in other international fora.
Pacific leaders gathered for a conference in Palau said exceeding 1.5°C threatens the survival of small island states, the Fossil Fuel Treaty campaign reports.
“To maintain a high-ambition scenario, we need urgent climate action on transitioning away from fossil fuels,” said Ralph Regenvanu, Vanuatu’s minister of climate change, adaptation, meteorology and geo-hazards, and energy. “This means a rapid transition away from fossil fuels and fossil fuel subsidies. There is no other way.”
The International Union for the Conservation of Nature said the “stark findings” in the report point to the need for urgent climate action.
“With every year of delay, our options narrow, but we are not powerless,” Director General Dr. Grethel Aguilar said in a release. “While this report tells us that the world is set to exceed 1.5°C warming, crucially, it also stresses that we must accelerate emissions reductions now and act on the solutions we already have. Every fraction of a degree matters, and the choices we make today to minimize the magnitude and duration of the overshoot will shape the future of people and nature.”
Passing the Longtime Warming Threshold
After the Paris climate accord, AP writes, the United Nations ordered its climate science arm to study different warming limits. A goal of 1.5°Celsius above mid-19th century temperatures became generally accepted after the scientists found dramatic impacts that affect people and the planet at 2°C.
Average global warming is now at 1.4°C above pre-industrial levels, some scientists have calculated. The measure is based on a 20-year average, rather than a single year’s temperatures.
Despite experts saying there’s no way to limit warming to 1.5°, UN officials long maintained the 1.5° window was still open. Wednesday’s report finally admitted that the world will cross that threshold “in the next few years.”
The report said the most optimistic scenario has warming peaking at 1.8°C around mid-century if countries pursue ambitious climate goals, but governments’ current policies would push temperatures to 2.6°C above pre-industrial levels by 2100.
So instead of preventing warming of 1.5°, now the UN said it wants policymakers to “prepare for and navigate a future” in which the globe crosses that limit and then corrects course and cools temperatures. The report envisions that global temperatures will pass 1.5 “within the next few years,” follow a hump-shaped path of more warming, peak, then gradually cool to below the 1.5 mark, ideally by the end of the century. The report and experts call it “overshoot.”
“Let’s be very clear, 1.5 target is still the goal. But now we need to approach it differently from above,” said UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen.
The 1.5 limit is not “some magical climate cliff” where it’s just game over, said University of Victoria climate scientist and former provincial Green Party leader Andrew Weaver, who wasn’t part of the study. “Every tenth of a degree we avoid still means less damage.”
Limiting How Far Temperatures Exceed the Threshold
It’s most important to first limit the new peak temperature and then reduce the amount of time above 1.5°, Andersen said.
But the world likely will be in that overshoot period for “many, many decades,” Betts said.
Every five years of delay in reducing emissions adds at least a tenth of a degree to peak warming, said report co-author Joeri Rogelj, a climate scientist at Imperial College London.
“If we act now we can limit overshoot,” the report said. “Not a safe world, but safer than remaining above” 1.5° for the long term.
“This is among the bleakest UN climate reports I have read. It carries the unmistakable tone of desperation, frustration and urgency—but not resignation,” Weaver said.
Climate scientist Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics, said that “although UNEP does a good job of describing the hole we’ve dug ourselves into, it does a poor job of showing us that there’s a way out.”
A Deadlier, Hungrier, Thirstier World
Governments need to increase efforts to adapt to worsening warming, which hits the poor hardest, “because some impacts simply cannot be avoided,” Andersen said.
The report calls this phase “coping and containment.”
During the overshoot period, more people will die or get sick because of worsening climate change and the extreme weather that results, the report said. Food production will drop, people will go hungry, water shortages will worsen, economies will be hurt, and species like coral will go extinct, the report said.
Although the triggers behind the recent deadly flooding in Nepal that came as part of a Himalayan glacier dislodging are complex, Betts said, “unfortunately we do expect to see more of such things and this is exactly why we need to limit peak warming.”
The report warns of “tipping points” with irreversible and cascading effects, including the loss of the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, the loss of the Amazon rainforest, and the shutdown of the Atlantic Ocean circulation system that keeps much of Europe warm.
“Some locations might become more or less uninsurable or even uninhabitable,” the report said.
The last phase in overshoot is cooling the planet by removing carbon dioxide from the air and storing it somewhere. The report said the traditional approach, planting more trees, could at most shave a tenth of a degree off global temperatures. So the authors said more novel carbon removal approaches will be needed.
But the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) said the approach of the 1.5°C threshold should be a signal to double down on a fossil fuel phaseout, not gamble on carbon removal.
“Exceeding 1.5℃ and ‘managing’ overshoot is not a strategy,” Lili Fuhr, director of CIEL’s fossil economy program, said in a release. “It is a moral and political failure. It locks us into irreversible harm, while those least responsible for the climate crisis are forced to bear its worst consequences.”
1.5°C “is a question of survival” for many communities, ecosystems, and nations, and “approaching it is a call to act faster and fairer, not gamble on false promises that only deepen the crisis,” Fuhr added. “Even the most optimistic and highly theoretical scaling of carbon removal would not deliver more than a few tenths of a degree this century, while locking us into decades of additional fossil fuel use, injustices, and harm.”
But the Washington, DC-based Carbon Removal Alliance said the prospect of 1.8°C average global warming makes a “diverse portfolio” of carbon removal options essential.
“Emissions reductions alone are not enough to avoid dangerous global heating,” Chief of Staff Dana Jacobs said in a release. “Returning global temperatures to below 1.5ºC this century requires both rapid emission cuts and immediate, scaled deployment of high-quality carbon dioxide removal. Carbon removal is not a theoretical concept or a distant backup plan—it is an active industry with deployable technologies right now.”
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