To much fanfare, global leaders have agreed to tackle the climate crisis by ratifying the Paris climate agreement, but a group of esteemed scientists is warning that current pledges to reduce emissions are far from sufficient and, in fact, put the world on track to reaching the dangerous 2°C climate threshold by 2050.
“The pledges are not going to get even close,” said Sir Robert Watson, former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and lead author of a new report out Thursday. “If you governments of the world are really serious, you’re going to have to do way, way more.”
Aptly titled The Truth About Climate Change, the report, put forth by the Argentina-based Universal Ecological Fund (Fundación Ecológica Universal FEU-US), comes amid a rash of new research, all suggesting that key global warming thresholds will be reached much more rapidly than previously thought.
Led by Watson, the team examined the climate commitments, known as Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs), put forth by COP21 signatories and concluded that the delayed commitment to climate action has essentially eliminated the possibility to keeping the Earth’s temperature increase beneath 1.5°C.
The report states:
Further, the researchers minced no words when laying the blame for the missed targets on “political and sectoral interests,” including those “benefiting from the use of fossil fuels,” for promoting “deliberate misinformation” about the current situation.
Thursday’s study, which came just one day before European leaders agreed on a fast-track, joint ratification of the Paris accord, concludes with a call for nations to “rais[e] the ambition of the INDCs” and commit to “a radical change in the way the world produces and uses energy.”
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