15 December 2015, Carbon Brief, The world has spoken. It wants to limit future temperatures rises to 1.5C above historic levels. To achieve this everything must change. The twelfth of December 2015 may well be remembered as the day the human race came together and saved the world. Old differences between rich and poor, west and east were laid aside. Unbeknownst to anyone, six months ago and in secret, the sinking Marshall islanders started to raise an army of more than 100 ambitious nations that rose above the flotsam and jetsam of self-interest and created a stronger climate agreement than anyone thought possible. The Paris agreement aims to hold the increase in the global average temperatures to “well below 2C above pre-industrial levels” and to “pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5C”. It also requires parties to produce audited emission-reduction commitments ratcheting up every five years, and delivers a “floor” of $100 billion per year of financing up to 2025. So unexpected was this that we climate scientists were caught napping. Before Paris, we all thought 2C was a near-impossible target and spent our energies researching future worlds where temperatures soared. In fact, there is still much to discover about the specific advantages of limiting warming to 1.5C, and the plausible social and economic pathways that might keep us under this limit. Some have derided the 1.5C target as a pipe dream, given that current national pledges to reduce carbon dioxide emissions – known as Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) – could bring us closer to 3C. However, the limited research that does exist suggests that it is possible to overshoot 1.5C and return below it by 2100. And the figure below illustrates how a five-year ratchet mechanism of increasingly ambitious INDCs could deliver a temperature close to 1.5C by 2100. Read More here

14 December 2015, Energy Post, Paris emission cuts aren’t enough – we’ll have to put carbon back in the ground. With the Paris climate deal, the world has created the mother of all take-back schemes, writes Myles Allen, Professor of Geosystem Science at the University of Oxford. According to Allen, fossil fuel companies don’t necessarily have to stop producing CO2 – they just need to be required to ensure it doesn’t end up in the atmosphere. #takebackCO2 – start tweeting it now! Courtesy of The Conversation. I wonder how many of the delegates in Paris realise that they have just created the mother of all “take-back schemes”. As a consumer, you may have already come across this sort of deal: if you don’t want to dispose of the packaging of your new sofa, you can take it back to IKEA and it’s their problem. In many places, you can even take back the sofa itself when your kids have wrecked it. For the Paris climate deal to succeed something similar will have to happen, where companies that rely on fossil fuels will be obliged to “take back” their emissions. The agreement reaffirms a commitment to stabilising temperature rises well below 2℃, and even retains the option of limiting warming to 1.5℃ if possible. But it also confirms national targets that do little more than stabilise global emissions between now and 2030. Given those emissions, sticking to within 2℃ will require us to take lots of carbon out of the atmosphere and store it in the ground. The parties to the agreement are, in effect, saying “we’re going to sell this stuff, and we’re going to dispose of it later”. How do I know? Well, peak warming is overwhelmingly determined bycumulative carbon dioxide emissions. To stabilise temperatures at any level, be it 1.5℃, 2℃ or even 3℃, net carbon dioxide emissions must be reduced to zero. Most governments, environmental groups and business leaders now understand this. And it is acknowledged, albeit implicitly, in Article 4 of the Paris agreement, which calls for greenhouse emissions to be “balanced” by carbon sinks some time after mid-century. But we’re unlikely to hit “net zero” emissions before temperatures reach 2℃, and even less likely before they reach 1.5℃. Warming is currently at about 1℃ and rising by 0.1℃ every five to ten years. We could slow the warming by reducing emissions, of course. But if we fail to reduce at the required rate – and the inadequate emissions targets indicate this is the intention – then we will be left with no option but to scrub the excess CO₂ back out of the atmosphere in future. Read More here