Sign In or Create an Account.

By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy

Economy

How Climate Pollution Has Risen Since 1950 — and How Fast It Must Fall

A helpful, if sobering, chart on the world's climate problem, courtesy of the UN.

The United Nations.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The United Nations has published its first report card on the world’s progress meeting the climate goals under the Paris Agreement.

Although the agency doesn’t give a letter grade, the overwhelming message is clear: The world is not a pleasure to have in class. Countries are still failing to hit the goals that they set for themselves under the Paris Agreement in 2015.

Despite recent climate initiatives and new laws in the United States, China, and Europe, the world is not on track to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. And it is nowhere close to keeping average temperatures from rising 1.5 degrees, which has become a threshold for near-term climate danger.

The new assessment captures something important but often overlooked about the Paris Agreement. The treaty is largely nonbinding: It imposes no pollution-related restrictions on its members. But what it prescribes, instead, is a process. For the first time ever, that process is about to enter a new stage.

Here is how the Paris process works: Every five years, each country must submit a detailed pledge saying how much it will cut its greenhouse-gas emissions in the years to come. (These are called “Nationally Determined Contributions,” or NDCs.) A few years after that, the world engages in a “global stocktaking,” a review of how much progress has been made toward those goals and how far off humanity is from its climate goals. Then two years later, each country submits a new, more ambitious plan.

The 2023 UN climate conference, which will happen in Dubai, will see the first of these “global stocktakes.” It is meant to set the stage for 2025, when countries will formally update their Paris Agreement plans.

Last week’s report is written largely in UN-ese, a somewhat bland series of pledges and phrases that leave one with the impression that somebody should do something about all the emissions. It emphasizes that “radical decarbonization” is now needed, which will involve a rapid scale-up of renewable energy, the broad electrification of transport, and a phase-out of all “unabated” fossil fuels.

But perhaps most importantly, the report contains a helpful graph that dramatizes just how far the world remains from its most ambitious climate goals.

How climate pollution has risen since 1950 — and how it must soon fall

Courtesy of the United Nations

There are a few lessons in this chart:

Meeting the Paris Agreement goals will be extremely difficult. Since 1850, the world has steadily put more and more carbon pollution into the air every year. Decade after decade, that trend line has only ever gone up. In 2023, roughly 50 gigatons of carbon dioxide — or about 110 trillion pounds — will stream into the atmosphere from human-related activities.

Yet to meet the Paris Agreement goals, that two-century mega-trend must not only end, but almost immediately reverse itself. To have the best chance of hitting the Paris targets, global greenhouse-gas emissions must peak by the end of 2025 — scarcely more than two years away.

As soon as emissions peak, they must fall precipitously. In order to hit the 1.5 degree goal, for instance, annual global carbon pollution must fall by 48% by 2030, compared to its 2019 level.

Even the world’s most ambitious climate pledges still won’t meet the Paris Agreement goals. The world has made tremendous progress since 2010, when climate change looked likely to cause 3.7 to 4.8 degrees Celsius, equal to about 7 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit, of warming by the end of the century. That would have been catastrophic.

Today, scientists project temperatures to rise to something like 2.5 degrees Celsius, or about 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit, above their pre-industrial levels.

But that still won’t be enough to hit the Paris goals. Look at the red range in the chart labeled “NDCs,” the plans that countries must submit under the Paris Agreement. Although it’s not in the chart, the text of the report provides details about how much these NDCs will actually reduce emissions.

When you take these NDCs together, they suggest that the world could keep global warming to 2.1 degrees Celsius. And if countries’ long-term targets are taken into account, and the most optimistic assumptions are applied, then global temperatures may rise as little as 1.7 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.

But those long-term plans remain speculative, and an “implementation gap” remains between what the world has promised to do and what its policies actually say will happen. And in any case, even those ambitious plans won’t bring the world to the 1.5-degree goal.

Reducing emissions, on a year-over-year basis, will be even harder. Fossil fuels remain the primary industrial energy input to the global economy. As you can see from the chart, global emissions have never seriously plateaued for any length of time, and they remain largely coupled to the global economy. (The most recent big dip in annual emissions was caused by the Covid recession.)

That’s because almost all energy development is additive: Although we think of types of energy as displacing each other — so that renewables replace natural gas, say, or coal replaced wood fires — humanity has largely added energy capacity since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. The world burned more coal last year than it ever has before. Although statistics are more scarce, biomass consumption — wood-burning — is said to also be at an all-time high.

There are positive signs. As the report notes, 10- and in some cases 100-fold declines in the cost of solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries have seen new renewable technologies get rapidly deployed over the past decade. But the world is not moving fast enough.

And perhaps that’s the most upbeat way to see the report card: The age of planning and innovation has ended, the UN is saying. The world of scaling and deployment is about to begin.

You’re out of free articles.

Subscribe today to experience Heatmap’s expert analysis 
of climate change, clean energy, and sustainability.
To continue reading
Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.
or
Please enter an email address
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Electric Vehicles

Oversize EVs Have Some Big Issues

Any EV is better for the planet than a gas-guzzler, but size still matters for energy use.

A very large Ford F-150 Lightning.
Heatmap Illustration/Ford, Tesla, Getty Images

A few Super Bowls ago, when General Motors used its ad spots to pitch Americans on the idea of the GMC Hummer EV, it tried to flip the script on the stereotypes that had always dogged the gas-guzzling SUV. Yes, it implied, you can drive a military-derived menace to society and still do your part for the planet, as long as it’s electric.

You don’t hear much about the Hummer anymore — it didn’t sell especially well, and the Tesla Cybertruck came along to fill the tank niche in the electric car market. But the reasoning behind its launch endures. Any EV, even a monstrous one, is a good EV if it convinces somebody, somewhere, to give up gasoline.

Keep reading...Show less
Climate

AM Briefing: Hottest Summer Ever

On new heat records, Trump’s sea level statements, and a super typhoon

We Just Lived Through the Hottest Summer Ever
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: Torrential rains flooded the streets of Milan, Italy • The U.K. recorded its coldest summer since 2015 • The temperature in Palm Springs, California, hit 121 degrees Fahrenheit yesterday.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Summer 2024 was hottest on record

Summer 2024 was officially the warmest on record in the Northern Hemisphere, according to new data from the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. Between June and August, the average global temperature was 1.24 degrees Fahrenheit higher than the 1991-2020 average, beating out last summer’s record. August 2024 tied August 2023 for joint-hottest month ever recorded globally, with an average surface air temperature of 62.27 degrees Fahrenheit.

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow
Economy

How to Make a Ghost Town

The raw material of America’s energy transition is poised for another boom.

Superior, Arizona.
Heatmap Illustration/Jeva Lange, Library of Congress

In the town of Superior, Arizona, there is a hotel. In the hotel, there is a room. And in the room, there is a ghost.

Henry Muñoz’s father owned the building in the early 1980s, back when it was still a boarding house and the “Magma” in its name, Hotel Magma, referred to the copper mine up the hill. One night, a boarder from Nogales, Mexico, awoke to a phantom trying to pin her to the wall with the mattress; naturally, she demanded a new room. When Muñoz, then in his fearless early 20s, heard this story from his father, he became curious. Following his swing shift at the mine, Muñoz posted himself to the room with a case of beer and passed the hours until dawn drinking and waiting for the spirit to make itself known.

Keep reading...Show less
Green