Nov. 14 (UPI) — Climate Action Tracker said Thursday there has been a three-year standstill in global warming projections, with no improvement since 2021.
Based on the aggregate effect of current climate policies, the world is on a path toward 2.7 degrees Celsius of warming, the report said.
“Despite an escalating climate crisis marked by unprecedented wildfires, storms, floods, and droughts, our annual global temperature update shows global warming projections for 2100 are flatlining, with no improvement since 2021,” Climate Action Tracker said in a statement.
CAT said 2024 has been marked by minimal overall progress on the global warming climate crisis.
“This three-year standstill underscores a critical disconnect between the reality of climate change and the urgency that governments are giving to the policies needed to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions, driving global warming at a rate of close to 0.3 degrees Celsius per decade,” the group said.
CAT’s annual climate report said while Donald Trump’s election will impact projected temperature levels due to expected rollbacks of climate change policies, it’s uncertain to what extent.
“It could add 0.04 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100 to our current policy estimate of 2.7 degrees Celsius (assuming the rollback of policies is limited to the United States) to a few tenths of a degree to our optimistic scenario of 1.9 degrees Celsius (assuming the U.S. net zero target is permanently removed),” CAT’s statement said. “This would be very damaging to the prospects of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius”
Climate Analytics CEO Bill Hare said the full impact of Trump’s election won’t be known until he takes office, but added there is a “clear energy momentum in the U.S. now that will be difficult to stop.”
“Clearly, we won’t know the full impact of the US elections until President-elect Trump takes office, but there is a clean energy momentum in the US now that will be difficult to stop,” Hare said. “While the Trump administration will undoubtedly do its best to throw a wrecking ball into climate action, the clean energy momentum created by President [Joe] Biden, being actioned across the country, is likely to continue at significant scale.”
The CAT global climate crisis update said while clean energy investments are now double those for fossil fuels, fossil fuel subsidies “remain at an all-time high and funding for fossil fuel-prolonging projects quadrupled between 2021 and 2022.”
CAT said a peak of global warming emissions is expected by the end of the decade, but projections lack the steep decline necessary to reach the Paris Agreement climate goals.
That emissions peak is also expected to be at a much higher level than three years ago, according to the CAT report.
“We are clearly failing to bend the curve. As the world edges closer to these dangerous climate thresholds, the need for immediate, stronger action to reverse this trend becomes ever more urgent,” said CAT report lead author Sofia Gonzales-Zuniga of Climate Analytics in a statement.
The report focused on climate polices in the seven largest sources of global warming emissions plus the UAE, Azerbaijan and Brazil.
China, the United States, India, the European Union, Indonesia, Japan and Australia are the largest sources of emissions.
