The world’s current climate pledges are insufficient to keep the goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement firmly within grasp. Global warming will likely surpass the 1.5-degree Celsius limit.
We are going to overshoot.
But countries can curb time spent in a warmer world by adopting more ambitious climate pledges and decarbonizing faster, according to new research led by scientists at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, the University of Maryland and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Doing so, they warn, is the only way to minimize the overshoot.
While exceeding the 1.5-degree limit appears inevitable, the researchers chart several potential courses in which the overshoot period is shortened, in some cases by decades. The study published today in the journal Nature Climate Change, during the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference, also known as COP27, held in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt.
Read more at DOE/Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Image: More ambitious climate pledges could bring net-zero carbon dioxide emissions within this century, according to new research. Such a path is marked by rapid transformations throughout the global energy system and the scaling up of low-carbon technologies like renewables, nuclear energy, as well as carbon capture and storage, said the new study's authors. (Photo by Andrea Starr | Pacific Northwest National Laboratory)