- Hundreds of scientists and government officials from more than 190 countries have been around a convention centre in the South Korean city of Incheon trying to agree on the first official release of a report called the Summary for Policymakers that pulls together all of what’s known about how the world might be affected once global warming gets to 1.5C.
- The report, being pulled together by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was one tiny part of the Paris climate change agreement.
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If you add up all the things that the 190-plus countries have committed to do as part of that Paris deal, global temperatures will probably go well above 3C.
- A report by Professor Will Steffen includes estimates of how much extra CO2 and temperature they could add once you hit about 2C of global warming.
- For example, the ability of the land and ocean to keep soaking up CO2 could weaken, giving you an extra 0.25C of warming. Dieback of trees in the Amazon and subarctic could give us another 0.1C.
- While governments have the means to affect how much CO2 gets released through policies that radically cut the use of fossil fuels, it would be much harder to get a grip on thawing permafrosts, mass forest collapses or the loss of polar sea ice.
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For those who understand the idea of a carbon budget – where scientists have calculated how much CO2 you could emit before hitting certain temperature rises – it looks even meaner than before if Steffen and his colleagues are right.
- By failing to get a grip on a thing that’s feasibly under your control, we end up risking the release a whole gang of other monsters that we can’t.
Earth’s climate monsters could be unleashed as temperatures rise
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