Earth to warm 2.5-2.9C even with current climate pledges: UN

Paris: Countries’ greenhouse gas-cutting pledges put Earth on track for warming far beyond key global limits, potentially up to a catastrophic 2.9 degrees Celsius this century, the United Nations said Monday.

The UN Environment Programme’s annual Emissions Gap report is released just ahead of crucial COP28 climate talks and will feed into the global response to a sobering official “stocktake” of the failure to curb warming so far.

With this year expected to be the hottest in human history, UNEP said “the world is witnessing a disturbing acceleration in the number, speed and scale of broken climate records”.

But the report said humanity is continuing to pump record levels of planet-heating greenhouse gases into the atmosphere — largely from fossil fuels.

It warned that taking into account countries’ decarbonisation plans, the planet is on a path for disastrous warming of between 2.5C and 2.9C by 2100. Based just on existing policies and emissions-cutting efforts, the world would heat 3C.

The 2015 Paris Agreement saw countries agree to cap global warming at “well below” 2C above preindustrial times — with a safer limit of 1.5C if possible.Nearly 1.2C of global heating so far has already unleashed an escalating barrage of deadly impacts across the planet.