Climate change prevention, more difficult than scientists thought

One major goal of the Paris Agreement is to reduce carbon emissions and keep global average temperature rise below 2ºC.

According to the report, global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and industrial activities will reach approximately 37 billion tons at the end of 2019, Anew record. Emissions from all human activities, including changes in fossil fuel use, industrial activity, and land use, are estimated at 41 billion tons, close to the 2015 record.

The increase in global greenhouse gas emissions in 2019 is mainly responsible for increasing emissions in united states,China and other developing countries, the report said.

To keep track of the world's progress towards achieving below 2C° climate scientists use a temperature baseline that began to be observed in the late 1800s.
However, the new paper finds that this baseline may not represent the actual global average temperature before the start of artificial warming. The author of the paper says the old baseline is more accurate.

If the results of this study are correct, the world is 0.2ºC warmer than previously estimated, and to achieve the current emission reduction targets, carbon combustion needs to be kept below 40%.

While countries around the world are trying to stop the worst impacts of global warming by reducing carbon emissions, the new paper is a “pre-industrial” baseline accuracy that is crucial to achieving the reduction targets Have doubts about.

As of 2016, 196 countries that agreed to the Paris Agreement (this number decreased to 195 because US President Donald Trump announced the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Agreement) increased the global average temperature increase by 1800 A commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions was made to keep it below 2ºC compared to a baseline that began to be observed in the second half of the decade.

According to the latest report from the Global Carbon Project and the University of East Anglia, greenhouse gas emissions will increase by 2% by the end of 2019.

According to the report, total emissions from fossil fuels and industrial activities reached 3.7 billion tons in 2019. setting a new record. Greenhouse gas emissions from human activities such as fossil fuel use, industrial activities and land use changes are estimated to be about 4.1 billion tonnes, the same as the 2015 record.

The report says China,united states  and other developing countries are mainly responsible for the increase in overall greenhouse gas emissions in 2019.

Throughout the 2000s, global CO2 emissions from industrial activities and fossil fuel combustion increased by an average of over 3 percent annually. However, the increase began to slow in the 2010s. Contrary to the overall upward trend, greenhouse gas emissions have leveled off for the past three years from 2016to 2018, creating the cause of cautious optimism that finally began to take a climate-friendly orbit. However, new research reports from the Global Carbon Project and the University of East Anglia estimate that greenhouse gas emissions will have increased by 2% by the end of 2019.

The reason climatic scientists use this baseline is that it is believed that human activity that causes climate change is not significantly affected by the temperature before the observation began. However, research results in a paper published this week in  Nature Climate Change  showed that civilized societies in the mid-1800s emitted enough greenhouse gases to change the global average temperature. Pointing to that.

The paper argues that the pre-industrial premise probably started long before, and the way to less than 2ºC may be farther than we thought it would be.

The Earth has warmed 1ºC (1.8ºF) compared to before the industrial revolution, says the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is probably wrong. In fact, it has risen by 1.2ºC (2.16ºF), ”said Michael Mann, professor and director of Amelia Pennsylvania State University / Center for Earth System Sciences and co-author of the paper.

Peatland fire on Sumatra Island. Peat emits high concentrations of carbon dioxide in a fire.

Another reason that temperature data from the late 1800s were used as a baseline after the industrial revolution was that the technology needed to accurately observe temperature was not available at that time. However, modern advances have allowed scientists to go back in time to determine temperature and to analyze the amount of carbon dioxide contained in bubbles trapped in an ice core hundreds of years ago.

In doing so, scientists realized that greenhouse gas emissions actually began to increase since the 1750s. The concentration of greenhouse gases is currently about 410 ppm, compared to 280 ppm before the industrial revolution. Looking back to the timeline that has not been considered so far, but before the industrial revolution, when CO2 actually began to increase, the greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere is an additional 30-40 ppm Mann told E & E News that it would be done .

In other words, if the world wants to keep the temperature rise below 2 ° C, Mann and his colleagues wrote in a paper that it might be necessary to review the time to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. Yes.

“The IPCC research community uses pre-industrial definitions that underestimate the global warming that has already begun,” said Prominent Atmospheric Science Professor at Pennsylvania State University and Center for Earth System Sciences. Said Michael Mann, director of the company. “If we want to avoid the most dangerous climate change, we have to reduce carbon combustion even more than we have ever thought.”

So how much carbon combustion must be reduced to keep the temperature rise below 2 ° C? Mann said it should be reduced by 40%. In other words, this paper concludes that if we want to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement, countries will need to reduce their emissions by nearly twice.

“There is no choice but to revise the goals of the Paris Agreement or determine that global warming had started in the latter half of the 19th century,”.Mann said

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