The research association Climate Action Tracker (CAT) published its latest projections on Thursday of how greenhouse gas emissions may dangerously increase the global average temperature. The result is similar to last year: a worrying 2.7°C increase above pre-industrial levels if policies do not improve, but a different point of comparison adds a new dimension to the finding.
The key numbers of the updated projections:
* If current policies are maintained, the world will warm by an average of 2.7°C by 2100. This is far, far into the danger zone.
* If the 2030 targets are implemented, this figure will drop to 2.4°C, the same as the CAT estimate last year.
* If countries pursue their more aggressive carbon reduction targets, it will fall to 2°C, which still falls short of the Paris Agreement’s test of “well below” that mark.
* In an optimistic scenario, where everything that can go right does go right, warming is limited to 1.8°C. But this is a figure that Inger Andersenexecutive director of the UN Environment Programme, recently described as “currently not credible”.
The estimates are in line with a UN report released last month that projects a rise in average temperatures of 2.5C by the end of the century if countries only stick to their current commitments.
In a report detailing the projections, CAT researchers also document how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continues to accelerate the global gas rush. There is more gas infrastructure proposed, approved or under construction than could exist without the world exceeding the 1.5°C warming limit of the Paris Agreement. Only existing gas infrastructure keeps the world off the International Energy Agency’s “net zero emissions” pathway by 2030. As it stands, gas use in 2030 must be at least one 30% below 2021 levels.
“If it was just about replacing Russian gas, we’re totally overdoing it,” he said Niklas Höhne, a climate policy scientist at the New Climate Institute in Germany who contributes to the CAT. “And that’s not good news.”
The report sets out a serious dilemma: either the gas construction boom will put lower levels of global warming out of reach, or countries are rushing to build assets that they will soon abandon.
Some industry efforts to curb methane emissions may be too little, too late from a carbon accounting perspective, according to the report. Efforts to reduce “fugitive emissions” or infrastructure leaks are common in many national plans, “but this misses the real challenge: going beyond coal, oil and gas by phasing out production,” the authors write of the CAT. “Just as there is no such thing as ‘clean coal’, there is no such thing as ‘clean oil’ or ‘clean gas’.”
The focus on gas and its potential to thwart climate goals puts a more serious focus on the situation than the International Energy Agency’s recent World Energy Outlook, which cited Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a point turning point in the race towards clean energy “not just for now”. be, but over the coming decades,” according to the IEA’s executive director Fatih Birol.
A clear shift away from gas has taken hold in some places as renewable energy continues to expand, Höhne said. “These are two competing trends,” he said. “And for us, we’d say it’s a little too early to say who’s going to win.”
The CAT figures are further sharpened by the harsh reality that 1.2°C of warming, the current level, is already causing worse impacts than expected, he said.
Still, seen from another perspective, the 2022 figures are less dire: they are a big improvement over the best-case scenario at COP15 in Copenhagen, where Climate Action Tracker published its first projections.
2009 was a long-distance sprint for diplomats, scientists, activists and business leaders hoping that the annual UN talks would finally result in an agreement. Barack Obama, then in the first year of his presidency, was so anxious for a deal that he flew to Copenhagen for the disastrous final days. Small island nations and like-minded developing countries went to Denmark imposing an aggressive temperature target (1.5°C above the pre-industrial average) that could give them a fighting chance of survival.
This did not happen until six years later, in Paris. But near the close of the COP15 talks, a consortium of researchers calling themselves the Climate Action Tracker released a briefing paper with some overwhelming news. The most aggressive targets then offered by developed countries would leave the world at around 3.2°C of warming by the end of the century. Less ambitious targets could lead to 3.5 degrees of warming and total catastrophe.
From the perspective of COP Copenhagen 2009, then, the fourteenth year of CAT is pretty incredible.
“It’s 1.5°C better than 2009. That’s, I think, remarkable,” said Höhne, who was lead author of the 2009 CAT analysis. “And it’s something that motivates me to keep doing this, because you have a lot of bad news. That’s the good news.”
A single UN climate conference may not seem like it will make much of a difference, he said. “But if we look at the system as a whole, the conferences from 2009 until now, they have certainly achieved something. We’re in a different world now.”
