‘Avoiding climate chaos requires change’

INCHEON: The UN’s 195-nation climate science body plunged deep into overtime to finalise a report outlining stark options – all requiring a global makeover of unprecedented scale – for avoiding climate chaos.

Working through the night, the closed-door meeting in Incheon was to convene a plenary later in the day to hammer through a “Summary for Policymakers”.

Can humanity cap global warming at 1.5°C? What will it take and how much will it cost? Would climate impacts be significantly less severe than in a 2°C world?

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was tasked with these questions by the framers of the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement, which calls for halting the rise in temperatures to “well below” 2°C – and 1.5°C if possible.

That aspirational goal – tacked on to the treaty at the last minute – caught climate scientists off-guard.

“Our understanding of 1.5°C was very limited, all but two or three of the models we had then were based on a 2°C target,” said Henri Waisman, a senior researcher at the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations in Paris, and one of the report’s 86 authors.

Based on more than 6,000 peer-reviewed studies, the 20-page bombshell will make for grim reading when it is released tomorrow.

“Leaders will have nowhere to hide once this report comes out,” said Jennifer Morgan, Executive Director of Greenpeace International, and an observer at the talks.

At current rates of greenhouse gas emissions, Earth will zoom past the 1.5°C signpost around 2040, and as early as 2030.

After only one degree of warming, the world has seen deadly storms engorged by rising seas and a crescendo of heatwaves, drought, flooding and wild fires made more intense by climate change.

Without a radical course change, we are headed for an unliveable 3°C or 4°C hike. And yet, humanity has avoided action for so long that any pathway to a climate-safe world involves wrenching economic and social change “unprecedented in terms of scale,” the report said.

“Some people say the 1.5°C target is impossible,” said Stephen Cornelius, WWF-UK’s chief adviser for climate change.

“But the difference between possible and impossible is political leadership.”

The report is set to lay out four scenarios that could result in Earth’s average surface temperature stabilising at 1.5°C.