There’s Still Time to Fix Climate—About 11 Years

O n October 31 world leaders will descend on Glasgow, Scotland, for the United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP26, in a last-ditch effort to defuse the climate emergency by limiting global warming to less than 1.5 degrees Celsius. Reaching that level would still bring violent storms, deep flooding, gripping droughts and problematic sea-level rise, but it would avert even more severe consequences. Global temperature has risen by nearly 1.1 degrees C since the industrial revolution.

A clear understanding of how emissions affect temperature shows that there is still time to reach the political agreements, economic transformations and public buy-in needed to sharply cut emissions, limit temperature rise and limit destruction. Nations can duck the 1.5-degree ceiling if they make deep cuts now. As of July 30, commitments to reduce emissions by the 191 nations that signed the 2015 Paris Climate Accord would permit 2.7 degrees of warming by 2100, according to a report issued in September by the secretariat of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, the group that coordinates ongoing pledges to the Paris Accord. The charge for the COP26 meeting is to eliminate the gap. Here’s what needs to happen.

The first step is to get rid of an old idea that the public, the media and policymakers are not clear on—the notion that even if humans stopped emitting carbon dioxide overnight, inertia in the climate system would continue to raise temperature for many years. Because CO2 can persist in the atmosphere for a century or more, the argument goes, even if the concentration stopped rising, temperature would keep going up because the heat-trapping mechanism is already in place. In other words, some level of future warming is “baked into” the system, so it’s too late to avoid the 1.5-degree threshold.

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