AAt the World Climate Conference in Dubai, participants are literally talking head to head about global warming. Although there is debate about the right path, there is widespread agreement that the goals of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement can only be achieved through a drastic reduction in human greenhouse gas emissions.
Only if we do not emit more carbon dioxide and its equivalents in 2050 than we bind can global warming be limited to 1.5 degrees compared to the pre-industrial age by the end of the century, is the thrust of the 197 signatory states to the United Nations.
Emissions must fall in two years
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently stated that the reduction must be 43 percent between 2019 and 2030. The “peak” should be reached in two years at the latest, in 2025, after which emissions must fall. But at the moment it doesn’t look like this, as new figures show, on the contrary: this year, emissions from oil, gas, coal and cement production are likely to have increased again and reached a peak.
This sad record emerges from the Global Carbon Budget report, which will be published this Tuesday on the occasion of the World Climate Conference. More than 120 scientists were involved and the study was led by the University of Exeter in England.
Emissions only fell during the Corona period due to the lockdowns and shutdowns, when many factories came to a standstill and mobility was also lower than usual. According to preliminary calculations, emissions in 2023 were around 36.8 billion tons (gigatons). That was 1.1 percent more than in 2022 and 1.4 percent more than in the pre-pandemic reference year 2019.
“We will exceed the 1.5 degree target”
“The impacts of climate change are evident all around us, while reducing carbon emissions from fossil fuels is painfully slow,” Exeter research leader Pierre Friedlingstein said in a statement. The study appears on Tuesday in the journal “Earth System Science Data.”
The German Press Agency quoted Julia Pongratz from the University of Munich, one of the main authors of the report, as saying: “It seems inevitable that we will exceed the 1.5 degree target.” With reference to the many natural disasters, she said : “The last few years have shown us dramatically how serious the consequences of climate change already are.”
With an increase of 1.5 percent, emissions from oil use rose more sharply in 2023 than those from coal and gas at 1.1 and 0.5 percent. The Western world continues to be quite successful in mitigation. In the EU, fossil fuel emissions fell by 7.4 percent and in the United States by 3 percent.
The world has little time to turn back
On the other hand, it rose by 4 percent in China and even by 8.2 percent in India. In the rest of the world there was a slight decline of 0.4 percent. The report does not identify Germany separately. In 2022, emissions there fell by 1.9 percent to 0.67 gigatons. Compared to the reference year 1990, this was a decrease of almost 37 percent. The German contribution to global emissions is around 1.8 percent.
The report makes clear how little time the world has left to turn around. In order to achieve a 50 percent chance of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees, a total of only 275 gigatons of CO2 should be released into the atmosphere from next year.
That would be around 7.5 years with the emissions from 2023. If you accept a 2 degree temperature increase, the budget is 1,150 gigatons or around 30 years. The CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is now 51 percent higher than before industrialization; In climate research, this is equated with the year 1850.
Unsustainable biomass critical
The report takes into account not only fossil fuels, but also other sources of emissions. Overall, human-generated (anthropogenic) emissions rose only slightly by 0.5 percent to 40.9 gigatons in 2023. The unsustainable use of biomass is considered critical. This particularly affects forestry and land use, for example by cutting down trees without enough new ones growing back.
Forestry and land use will release an estimated 4 gigatons of CO2 in 2023. That was 0.7 gigatons less than the average for the years 2013 to 2022. Only around two thirds of the emissions caused by deforestation were offset by reforestation, the authors write. According to the information, the largest emitters from forest and land use were Brazil, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo (Kinshasa). These three countries accounted for more than half of the output.
For the first time, the study also addresses technical options for reducing CO2. So far, however, these have not been able to offset even a millionth of the emissions, it was said. Nevertheless, methods for removing carbon dioxide from the air are becoming increasingly important, as not all emission fields can be electrified with green electricity or decarbonized in some other way.
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