NEW: Finally some (kinda) good climate news: humans could keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius. But only if countries stick to their pledges.
The researchers used all of those pledges to estimate global emissions in the future, then plugged that into a climate model, which calculated a temperature rise of under 2 degrees by the year 2100. “What this shows is that if governments achieve what they have said they want to achieve in terms of their net-zero pledges, this will be the first time that we would limit warming to below 2 degrees Celsius,” says McGlade.
In addition to that political movement, several trends have been converging to make this progress possible. For one thing, the costs of solar and wind power, as well as lithium-ion batteries to store electricity, cratered by up to 85 percent between 2010 and 2019, according to the. “It's really been very, very impressive and is one of the key reasons why we actually get this result in the paper,” says McGlade.
Also, those earlier scenarios predicting extreme warming were pieced together when the use of coal was skyrocketing. “A decade ago, the world looked like it was in a pretty bad place,” says Zeke Hausfather, climate research lead at Stripe and coauthor of acommentary that accompanied the new study. “Global coal use had almost doubled over the course of 10 years, primarily driven by China, and global emissions had increased by a third.
Instead, coal use peaked in 2013, Hausfather adds, and has since then been regularly replaced with natural gas, which spews less carbon. More dramatically, coal is getting pushed out by ever-cheaper renewables—the ultimate driver of an eventual carbon-free economy. At the same time, demand for electric vehicles. “No one expected we'd have an 8.5x decline in costs in just 10 years for both solar panels and batteries,” says Hausfather.
The world is getting warmer, the weather is getting worse. Here's everything you need to know about what humans can do to stop wrecking the planet.
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