Global heating – a glimmer of light in the gloom?

https://www.newweather.org/2021/02/09/global-heating-a-glimmer-of-light-in-the-gloom/

"As things stand, the world remains on course for a catastrophic 3 – 5°C global average temperature rise (compared to pre-industrial times) by 2100, and – notwithstanding a small, downward, Covid blip – greenhouse gas emissions show no sign whatsoever of slowing. In fact, 2021 will see atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations reaching a level 50 percent higher than before the industrial revolution began to transform our world and our climate.

The results of new research published early this year also seem to hammer the final nail into the coffin of 2015 Paris Climate Conference aspirations to the keep the global average temperature rise below 2°C. The authors of the new paper, in Nature Climate Change, evaluate how geographical variations of planetary heating can be used to get a better idea of the degree of ‘committed’ heating. In other words, how much hotter the Earth will become, even if we reduced greenhouse gas emissions to zero today.

Shockingly, they conclude that whatever action we take, it is now inevitable that our world will heat by more than 2°C, so bringing about all-pervasive, deadly, climate breakdown that will affect each and every one of us.

So far, so appalling. But hidden away amongst the despair there is also a glimmer of hope.... Although we may be committed to heating in excess of 2°C, the authors of the Nature paper also note something extraordinary and potentially game-changing.

While we are currently on track for the 2°C threshold to be crossed well before 2100, slashing emissions in coming decades would – it seems – rapidly reduce the rate of heating so that this marker might end up not being reached for centuries. This would give society far more time to adapt and perhaps launch initiatives to actively pull carbon out of the atmosphere so that we never get to 2°C at all. This is critical because, as one of the paper’s authors points out, ‘an extra degree in a few hundred years is far less damaging than a degree in a few decades.’"