IEA: irreversible climate change in 5 years

11 degree rise possible

David Crossley, Nov 09, 11.

The world has only about five years to make a dramatic turnaround in policies if it is to avoid severe impacts of climate change, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), as reported by National Geographic:

The IEA’s annual World Energy Outlook, released today, looks at what would be required to keep global warming below 3.6°F (2°C), a threshold many countries have pledged to stay below.

“We’re increasingly pessimistic,” said Richard Jones, deputy executive director of the IEA and a former U.S. diplomat.

“We’ve been trying to warn our member countries,” which includes most of the industrialized world, Jones said. “It’s getting harder and harder to meet this target.”

To have a good chance of staying below that amount of warming, the world has only a certain budget of emissions it can use-the equivalent of about 1 trillion tons of carbon dioxide emissions by mid-century.

The infrastructure the world is building today-including power plants, buildings, and factories-is based largely on burning fossil fuels, the main contributor to emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), the primary greenhouse gas, the report noted.

Once built, infrastructure usually stays in place until it wears out-so what we build now will “lock in” emissions for decades to come, the IEA argues.

The infrastructure already built today or in the planning stages would, over the coming decades, emit 80 percent of all the CO2 the world can afford to release into the air.

To keep emissions below that target, civilization could continue with business as usual for only five more years before the total allowed budget of emissions would be “locked in.” In that case, to meet the targets for warming, all new infrastructure built from 2017 onward would have to be completely emissions-free. MORE

“We can still act in time to preserve a plausible path to a sustainable energy future,” said IEA Executive Director Maria van der Hoeven. However, she added, “Each year the necessary measures get progressively tougher and viciously more expensive.”
IEA Press Conference
World Energy Outlook (IEA report)
Eric Berger, the SciGuy
Huffington Post
The Guardian
Climate Today
Climate Progress: Joe Romm
Photograph: Rex Features