Greenhouse Gas Emissions Need to Fall Over 7% Each Year. We Must Stop Procrastinating

We are doing nowhere near enough to limit climate change. Greenhouse gas emissions are rising when they should be falling. Countries need to urgently increase action or we will face a future of rising seas, extreme weather events and increased human misery. Sound familiar? Of course it does. Scientists, the United Nations (UN) and activists have been delivering variations of this message for more years than most of us care to remember, and their voices have only grown louder. Still, the world has not heeded their warnings. We have procrastinated, thinking we can catch up later. But now the hard deadline for serious action is upon us. Anybody still in doubt need only consider the latest findings of the UN’s annual Emissions Gap Report, which for the first time looks at the required reduction in emissions in annual terms. The report tells us that even if all current unconditional Paris commitments—those not dependent on outside financial or technical support those not dependent on outside financial or technical support—were implemented, we would remain on course for a 3.2°C rise in global average temperatures above pre-industrial levels. To get on track to limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5°C, we need to more than halve global emissions by 2030. Slicing this up evenly means emissions should fall 7.6% per year from 2020 to 2030. For the 2°C target, the figure is 2.7% each year. The size of these annual cuts is unprecedented. The best annu...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized climate change Source Type: news