While world leaders and negotiators are hailing the Glasgow climate pact as a good compromise that keeps a key temperature limit alive, many scientists are wondering what planet these leaders are looking at. Crunching the numbers they see a quite different and warmer Earth.
“In the bigger picture I think, yes, we have a good plan to keep the 1.5-degree goal within our possibilities,” United Nations climate chief Patricia Espinosa told The Associated Press, referring to the overarching global goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times.
United Kingdom Prime Minister Boris Johnson, the conference host, agreed, calling the deal a “clear road map limiting the rise in global temperatures to 1.5 degrees.”
German researcher Hans-Otto Portner said the Glasgow conference “got work done, but did not make enough progress.” “Warming will by far exceed 2 degrees Celsius.
This development threatens nature, human life, livelihoods, habitats and also prosperity,” said Portner, who co-chairs one of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scientific reports the United Nations relies on.
Instead of big changes in bending the temperature curve as the United Nations had hoped for from Glasgow, they got only tiny tweaks, according to scientists who run computer simulations. “Heading out of Glasgow we have shaved maybe 0.1C off of warming … for a best-estimate of 2.3C warming,” Breakthrough Institute climate scientist and director Zeke Hausfather said in an email.—AP
