The United Nations Has Finally Given Up On Its Tenuous Hold On Climate Optimism

The United Nations has finally admitted that the goal of
keeping the world from becoming 1.5 degrees warmer
than the 18 century average. 

The famous 1.5 degree Celsius climate change goal is officially kaput. 

That figure was the goal set during the international 2015 Paris climate accord. 

According to that decade old plan, the world wasn't supposed to get more than 1.5 degree Celsius or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit above the mid 19th century average.   

The UN is throwing in the towel with that one. Many other climate experts have been saying for months or even years that the world would not achieve the goal.  

The 1.5 degree target is still nominally the UN's goal, but they've finally admitted it's completely unrealistic. So, it's now all about trying to deal with the hotter world. 

As CBC reported:

"In a strategic retreat in the fight against climate change, the United Nations has acknowledged that Earth has lost its chance to prevent some of the worst of global warming's harms. Officials say the world must now figure out how to get temperatures below the danger zone and back to safety."

The trick now is to figure out over the next several decades how to get the world's temperature back under 1.5 degree C above the 19th centurial average. 

As the Associated Press reports: 

"Instead of giving up, scientists and the U.N. officials recommend trying to limit excessive warming and then bring the temperature back down to the agreed-upon threshold. But it will still mean decades of increased weather-related disasters rising seas, extinctions and melting ice and glaciers."

The 1.5 degree Celsius threshold is rather arbitrary. It's not like things will be OK until we reach 1.5 degrees, then all hell breaks loose. 

As the world has warmed, we've seen a gradual increase in record heat waves, destructive, wild storms and deepening droughts. 

Things will  just get worse and worse the higher the temperatures get. But you need to have goals, and that 1.5 degrees was the global goal, set by the U.N. 

The time for that goal has passed. The world is now 1.4 degrees hotter than it was in the 19th century. This is based on a 20 year average. The next couple of years will boost the average further, considering a strong El Nino will warm the world further. 

The U.N's latest most optimistic scenario now has the world's warming peaking at 1.8 degrees Celsius, or 3.2 degrees Fahrenheit about levels that we saw nearly two centuries.  Then, the hope is, the world would eventually start to cool back down a little. 

This is if countries around the world pursue ambitious climate goals starting now. Good luck with that. I'm looking at you, United States. 

To do this, the world would have to cut planet warming pollution 55 percent by 2035, then getting rid of virtually all fossil fuel emissions by 2050 or so. I do not see the political will do this. Correct me if I'm wrong. 

Washington Post explains the consequences: 

"The dangers at the scale of warming will still be significant. Rising sea levels will engulf small island nations and submerge many coastal communities. Heat waves, hurricanes, wildfires and floods, which already cause hundreds of thousands of deaths each year, will come many times more extreme. Without aggressive adaption measures, global food production could decline by 14 percent."

Also, even if we get above that 1.5 degree threshold for several decades, then manage to go below it again, it won't solve all the problems the world's warming has caused. Perhaps a quarter of the world's glaciers will have permanently melted away. Species will go extinct. Some ecosystems will never recover. 

If nothing changes in terms of policies, global temperatures will rise to 2.6 Celsius (4.7 degrees F)  over mid-19th century levels.  Per the AP:

"The UN's report says every five years of delay in reducing emissions adds at least a tenth of a degree to peak warming, said report co-author Joeri Rogelj, a climate scientist at Imperial College London." 

This is among the bleakest U.N. climate reports I have read. It carries the unmistakable tone of desperation, frustration and urgency - but not resignation," said Andrew Weaver, a climate scientist at the University of Victoria."

Making the temperature of the world go down is a lot harder than making it go up.  

Wapo again:

"That's because it is far more difficult to take carbon out of the atmosphere that it is to release it, said Joeri Rogelj, a climate scientist at Imperial College London and another lead author of the report."

We could plant million, or billions of trees to absorb carbon from the air. But those trees have to be planted somewhere.  Probably partly on agricultural land that should be used for food.  Then, if there's a forest fire, a big chunk of carbon absorption would be wiped out in a day.

We could build machines to suck carbon out of the air and store it underground. But we do not yet have the technology, or the money to do this on a large enough scale.  

For now, the world will keep warming. Maybe we'll get a temporary, semi-break around 2028 when El Nino ends and the Earth's temperature might go down marginally. But that will only be a blip, and the world will keep warming until humanity can get its act together. 

Since humanity has never truly gotten its act together, I'm not terribly optimist