Global Climate Change Researchers Announce Findings
"Greenhouse Gas Emissions Must Be Drastically Reduced"
There has been a warning that if current levels of carbon dioxide emissions continue, the "last line of defense" against climate catastrophe set by the Paris Agreement will be crossed in three years.
On the 19th, Yonhap News reported that the global research project "Indicators of Global Climate Change" (IGCC) published these findings in the international journal Earth System Science Data (ESSD) on this day. The IGCC includes more than 60 scientists, including authors of reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Since 2023, the IGCC has released annual climate change indicators reflecting changes since the IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report, and this year marks its third report.
In 2015, 195 countries agreed at the Paris Climate Agreement (COP21) to keep the increase in global average temperature well below 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels in the long term. In its latest report, the IGCC analyzed that the remaining carbon budget for the 1.5-degree target is 130 billion tons of CO2 equivalent (tCO2e)?the amount of greenhouse gases converted to carbon dioxide emissions. This means that if the world emits another 130 billion tons of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, there is a 50% chance of achieving the "1.5-degree target." The carbon budget refers to the remaining allowable carbon emissions to keep the rise in global average temperature within a certain limit. This is a significant reduction from the 500 billion tCO2e estimated under the same conditions in the IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) published in 2021. If global greenhouse gas emissions remain at the current record-high level of about 40 billion tons per year, it is estimated that the carbon budget will be completely exhausted in three years.
Piers Forster, a professor at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom who led this research, explained, "The fact that greenhouse gas emissions continue to reach record highs means that more and more people are experiencing the impacts of a climate that has changed to an unsafe level."
The report analyzed that in 2024, the Earth's surface temperature was 1.52 degrees Celsius higher than pre-industrial levels, with 1.36 degrees attributable to human activity. The research team described last year's global heatwave as "astonishingly exceptional." They explained that the record-breaking temperatures resulted from both the unprecedented impact of human activity on the climate and the natural variability of the climate system acting together.
The researchers stated, "The Paris Agreement's 1.5-degree target is based on long-term average temperature increases, so a single year of high temperatures does not mean the target has failed." However, they also emphasized, "Last year's case shows how quickly greenhouse gas management is heading in the wrong direction, and only by rapidly and significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions can we prevent these negative outcomes."
© The Asia Business Daily(www.asiae.co.kr). All rights reserved.
