The line humanity drew 11 years ago to protect the planet is collapsing, and the United Nations has acknowledged that failure in an official report for the first time.
A climate report released by the United Nations Environment Programme on the 5th states that exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming — the limit set at the 2015 Paris climate agreement — is now unavoidable. It is the first time in the 11 years since the Paris accord that the UN has directly conceded in an official report that the target will be breached. As recently as last year, the UN described the 1.5-degree goal as having only a slim chance of being met. This time it went a step further, saying the overshoot can no longer be prevented.
Inger Andersen, executive director of UNEP, said the 1.5-degree goal remains the aim, but added that the world must now approach the target differently, working down toward it from above. The remarks effectively formalize a shift in how the goal is to be pursued.
The new pathway laid out in the report is described as overshoot, peak and decline. It begins with cutting warming-causing substances by 55% by 2035 and bringing emissions to effectively zero by mid-century. Under that pathway, the report said, the rise in global temperatures could peak at about 1.8 degrees above pre-industrial levels before beginning to fall.
Even warming of about 1.8 degrees is far from safe. Rising sea levels would submerge island nations, and heat waves, hurricanes, wildfires and floods — already killing hundreds of thousands of people each year — are projected to grow more severe. The report also warned that global food production could fall 14% without aggressive adaptation measures.
The bigger problem is that even if temperatures come back down, the world will not return to what it was. The report said at least a quarter of the planet's glaciers have already melted away permanently, and species driven to extinction cannot be brought back. The recent flooding in Nepal that killed more than 1,000 people is also believed to have stemmed from glacial melt. Passing 1.5 degrees raises the risk of triggering tipping points in the climate system, such as the destruction of the Amazon or the collapse of polar ice sheets, the report noted.
El Nino is making the crisis steeper. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that El Nino is growing stronger before our eyes and said the world is entering a danger zone. The World Meteorological Organization said the super El Nino now under way is virtually 100% likely to persist through February.
According to WMO data, sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific ran 2.2 to 2.6 degrees above average from late July through mid-August, and in some areas rose by more than 8 degrees, an unusual reading. The WMO projected higher-than-average temperatures across most continents, along with frequent compound disasters including droughts, typhoons and floods.
Debra Roberts, a climate scientist who worked on the report, warned that reversing a threatening rise in temperatures is far harder than preventing it in the first place. Every five-year delay in cutting emissions is estimated to push the planet's peak temperature up by at least 0.1 degree. The report stressed that even a difference of 0.1 degree can be decisive for the planet and that humanity must move faster.
