Bad news and good news as climate talks open in Morocco

John Crump

By GRID-Arendal

November 7^th, 2016

The Paris climate agreement came into force last Friday, just ahead of this year’s climate negotiations in Marrakesh.

There has been a lot of bad news for the planet in the last year, beginning with the fact that 2016 is on track to be the hottest year on record. A strong El Niño began in 2015 and continued into this year. This periodic phenomenon is felt more acutely in a warming planet and brought with it droughts, raging forest fires and sweltering summer temperatures in many parts of the world.

This is also the year that greenhouse gas levels exceeded 400 parts per million and stayed there. At the start of the Industrial Revolution, levels were about 278 ppm. This lower level “represented a balance between the atmosphere, the oceans and the biosphere,” according to the UN’s World Meteorological Organisation. “Human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels has altered the natural balance….”

This last record is significant. The Paris agreement calls on countries to reduce their collective emissions to keep the average global temperature increase under 2 degrees Celsius, with 1.5 degrees as a preferred target. Global temperatures have already increased by about 1 degree since the advent of the Industrial Revolution. That means there isn’t much room – or time – to start making the kinds of dramatic emissions cuts that will keep us below the point where climate change will get out of control.

“The year 2015 ushered in a new era of optimism and climate action with the Paris climate change agreement. But it will also make history as marking a new era of climate change reality with record high greenhouse gas concentrations,” said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas. “The El Niño event has disappeared. Climate change has not.”

Emissions continue to increase despite the commitments in Paris to them under control by 2030. A report released by United Nations Environment last week underscores the situation.

“The world must urgently and dramatically increase its ambition to cut roughly a further quarter off predicted 2030 global greenhouse emissions and have any chance of minimizing dangerous climate change,” according to The Emissions Gap Report 2016. There is a mountain of scientific literature that points to 2°C as the threshold after which there will be a greater likelihood of “more intense storms, longer droughts, sea-level rise and other severe climate change impacts. Even hitting the lower target of 1.5°C will only reduce, rather than eliminate, impacts.”

The report came out the day before the Paris Agreement entered into force. It states that “2030 emissions are expected to reach 54 to 56 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent – far above the level of 42 needed to have a chance of limiting global warming to 2°C this century.” To get a perspective on how much a gigatonne is, the report says it is “roughly equivalent to the emissions generated by transport in the European Union (including aviation) over a year.”

This means the gap is 12 to 14 gigatonnes between the targets outlined in the Paris Agreement and where the UN Environment report sees the world going should countries’ ambition not increase.

A map of the September 2016 LOTI anomaly (Credit: NASA/GISS).

GOOD NEWS

There is good news, however. The fact that the Paris Agreement came into force less than a year after the tense negotiations that created it is a sign that countries are starting to wake up to the threat human society faces.

In other good news, the nations of the world gathered in Kigali, Rwanda, this autumn to tackle one of the most powerful greenhouse gases. Hydrofluorocarbons were introduced to replace other chemicals used in refrigeration called chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, when they were banned under the Montreal Protocol in the late 1980s because they were causing a huge hole in the ozone layer that protects the Earth from dangerous ultraviolet radiation. Eliminating the replacement HFCs has the potential to reduce global warming by 0.5 degrees Celsius “in a relatively short time.”

This year also saw the International Civil Aviation Organization agree to measures to reduce the effects of air travel. Aircraft emissions are an increasing source of greenhouse gases and the vapours they produce accentuate warming when released at high altitudes. There are expectations that the international shipping industry will also take steps to cut emissions from the dirty fuel used by tens of thousands of vessels around the world.

However, the clock continues to tick. The countries gathering in Marrakesh must get down to the hard work of making the Paris Agreement work. As Erik Solheim, the new head of UN Environment stated as the emissions gap report was released:

“We are moving in the right direction: the Paris Agreement will slow climate change, as will the recent Kigali Amendment to reduce HFCs. They both show strong commitment, but it‘s still not good enough if we are to stand a chance of avoiding serious climate change.

“If we don’t start taking additional action now, beginning with the upcoming climate meeting in Marrakesh, we will grieve over the avoidable human tragedy. The growing numbers of climate refugees hit by hunger, poverty, illness and conflict will be a constant reminder of our failure to deliver. The science shows that we need to move much faster.”