The pledges to battle climate change would still allow the world to heat up to a level that is likely to produce catastrophes, scientists say.
This post is going to be long, but it’s going to provide you with a lot of information provided through a two minute + video and several infographics. In addition, you can read this article from the New York Times. The video and infographics are extracted from multiple pages on the website of Climate Scoreboard. If you want to visit that website and poke around into all of its bunny holes and fun stuff, here’s the link.
What’s this about? Almost all the countries on the globe have now submitted to the United Nations each of their pledge to reduce or control their carbon emissions, all designed to reduce the projected increased in global temperature by the year 2100. The only hold-out is India, but India has said it will submit its pledge by October 1. These pledges have a fancy name: “Intended Nationally Determined Contributions,” or “INDC’s.” These will all be bundled together into the form of an agreement that will emerge from a meeting of representatives of all countries to be held in Paris in December 2015.
Since 2010, the governments of the world have agreed that the “target” temperature increase, based on science, is 2°Centigrade, or 3.6°Fahrenheit above global temperatures that our forefathers enjoyed before we started to industrialize the world. The New York Times article tells us what most scientists have said about an increase to that temperature: “That level of warming, while potentially producing dire effects on agriculture, sea level and the natural world, might at least be tolerable, some experts believe.”
This extract from the New York Times article will help you understand the temperature numbers splattered all over this post:
The planet has already warmed by about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit above the temperature that prevailed before the Industrial Revolution, representing an enormous addition of heat. Virtually every piece of land ice on Earth is melting, the sea ice in the Arctic is collapsing, droughts and other weather extremes are intensifying, and the global food system has shown signs of instability.
An analysis by researchers at Climate Interactive, a group whose calculations are used by American negotiators and by numerous other governments....shows that the collective pledges would reduce the warming of the planet at century’s end to about 6.3 degrees, if the national commitments are fully honored, from an expected 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit, if emissions continue on their present course.
First, watch this video. It visualizes these numbers, using infographics. When you watch the video, here’s a good guide to what you’re seeing:
If you don’t want to take this time to watch the video, but are still interested in these numbers, here are a few infographics.
This graph provides you with a little bit more detail: