We are losing the climate change mitigation challenge; Is it too late to recover?
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REVIEW We are losing the climate change mitigation challenge; Is it too late to recover?
Frank T. Princiotta, Retired, USEPA Research Director, Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27514, USA Address all correspondence to Frank T. Princiotta at [email protected] (Received 16 November 2016; accepted 17 April 2017)
ABSTRACT We are losing the climate change mitigation challenge. The task now before us: minimize the impacts. The status of the climate change mitigation challenge is analyzed and summarized. Pressures spawned by industrialization and population growth have driven unsustainable growth in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, yielding global warming. Such warming has accelerated over the last three years and for 2016 was 1.3 °C over pre-industrial levels. Serious climate change induced impacts have already occurred and more serious ones are projected. The recent UN Paris COP agreement is only a small step toward meaningful mitigation. It will only slow emission growth and will not lead to near term aggressive annual emission decreases, which are needed to avoid warming of 2 °C or more. We are losing the battle to protect the planet from unacceptable climate change impacts. To minimize the impacts, the following is needed: more aggressive communication of the seriousness of the problem to national leaders and the public, a serious adaptation program, a dramatically expanded RD&D program to accelerate the development of low cost low C technologies, with a focus on potentially transformational technologies, and a serious commitment to peak global emissions as soon as possible and drastically reduce such emissions annually from that point on. A global agreement to set a price on carbon (C) could be effective in helping to achieve such an aggressive emission reduction trajectory. Keywords: energy generation; environment; sustainability; transportation; economics
DISCUSSION POINTS • Is there a credible path to limit warming to no more than 2 °C? • What role can material recycling play in mitigating CO2 emissions? • H ow can we communicate the threat of potentially catastrophic climate change impacts to society more effectively?
Global warming has accelerated in recent years; we are approaching 1.5 °C warming from the pre-industrial era The planet continues to warm. Over the last three years, global warming has accelerated. 2016 was the third consecutive year of record warming increases. Figure 1,1 summarizes the temperature history relative to the 1881–1910 period. As can be seen, global temperatures increased by about 0.3 °C over the last three years to a projected overall warming of ∼1.3 °C, from pre-industrial levels. It should be noted that this extraordinary recent acceleration in warming was likely influenced by a strong El Nino meteorological
event, which has the characteristic of moving heat from the ocean to the atmosphere. Since this periodic event has faded, it appears unlikely that we will see such dramatic warming increases in the next several years. Nevertheless, these recent data debunk climate skeptic
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