Post COP29 Reality Check: World on the Verge of Breaking Its Paris Promise
Global heating on track to reach 2.7°C (or higher?), while fossil fuel CO2 emissions and oil and gas production have hit record levels.
The Paris Agreement was adopted in December 2015 at COP21. Credit: UNclimatechange via Flickr, CC BY 2.0
The COP29 UN climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan has concluded with a paltry $300 billion global climate finance agreement – a fraction of the trillions in loss and damage and climate mitigation and adaptation support that rich countries, which have benefited most from fossil fueled economic development, owe to poor developing countries. Environmental and civil society organizations slammed the COP29 outcome, with responses ranging from “woefully inadequate” to “a scam” to “a dumpster fire.” There were also no indications that countries plan on implementing the agreement reached at COP28 last year to “phase down” or transition away from fossil fuels. Oil Change International’s Shady Khalil said this amounts to “gross negligence with vested interests, for the benefit of the fossil fuel industry and its accomplices.”
Climate change diplomacy through the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is surely complex and messy, but the simple and deeply concerning reality is that global emissions and temperatures are rising, along with incalculable damages and deaths from extreme weather that will worsen as the planet heats up. Nearly ten years after the adoption of the 2015 Paris Agreement that pledges to limit warming to well below 2°C (and strive for no more than 1.5°C), the world is on the verge of breaking its Paris promise, as well as breaking the Earth’s physical life-support systems. More scientists are now acknowledging that the 1.5°C goal is shot, and 2°C is slipping away. At a time when the world should be planning to transition away from the hydrocarbons heating the Earth, oil and gas production has reached record levels, and so have their carbon emissions.
Climate scientists and analysts have issued multiple reports and updates this month during the UN climate summit. These annual updates serve as a sort of reality check or progress report. And while they are generally meant to help inform the negotiations, their relevance extends beyond the two-week summit. Here, then, is a recap of where things stand on global heating and emissions as well as oil and gas expansion.
2024 set to be warmest year in recorded history, and average temperatures have temporarily exceeded 1.5°C
The World Meteorological Association warns that 2024 will be the warmest year yet and that indicators of climate breakdown, from ocean heating to sea level rise to disappearing glaciers, are accelerating. The “sheer pace of climate change in a single generation” has prompted the UN specialized agency to once again issue a “red alert” in its latest annual update, released on November 11 at the start of COP29.
The past ten years (2015 to 2024) have been the warmest ten years on record, and atmospheric concentrations of heat-trapping greenhouse gases are at their highest observed levels. Oceans, which absorb about 90% of the thermal energy trapped in the Earth system, are warmer than ever, and sea level rise is accelerating.
The January – September 2024 global average surface temperature was 1.54°C above pre-industrial levels, amplified by a warming El Nino event. That does not mean that the Paris Agreement goal to limit warming to no more than 1.5°C has been breached, however, since that goal refers to the average global temperature over multiple years. Still, it is expected that the world will blow past the 1.5°C limit. But preventing every additional increment of warming is critically important for limiting the magnitude of damage. “Every fraction of a degree of warming matters,” said WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo.
Extreme weather, meanwhile, has continued to devastate communities across the globe, resulting in massive costs and human casualties. “The record-breaking rainfall and flooding, rapidly intensifying tropical cyclones, deadly heat, relentless drought and raging wildfires that we have seen in different parts of the world this year are unfortunately our new reality and a foretaste of our future,” said Saulo.
The Copernicus Climate Change Service, the EU’s climate change monitoring program, also projects 2024 to be the warmest yet on record. The global average temperature in 2024 is expected to be more than 1.55ºC (above pre-industrial levels), and October 2024 saw average temperatures of 1.65ºC – marking the 15th month out of a 16-month period with average temperatures exceeding the 1.5ºC threshold set by the Paris Agreement.
Fossil fuel CO2 emissions are at record high, and 1.5°C could be busted in six years
The remaining carbon ‘budget,’ or allowable carbon emissions under certain targets for limiting global temperature rise, “has almost run out” for the 1.5°C target established under the Paris Agreement, according to the 2024 Global Carbon Budget update issued on November 13. The international team of over 120 scientists say the 1.5°C threshold is likely to be breached (consistently over multiple years) in about 6 years – or by the start of the 2030s.
The update also reports that fossil fuel CO2 emissions are set to reach 37.4 billion tonnes in 2024, a record high that is up 0.8% from the year before. These emissions have risen over the last 10 years.
“The impacts of climate change are becoming increasingly dramatic, yet we still see no sign that burning of fossil fuels has peaked,” Pierre Friedlingstein, a professor at the University of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute who led this research, said in a statement.
Total CO2 emissions (including land use change) are projected to be 41.6 billion tonnes this year, up from 40.6 billion tonnes in 2023. And atmospheric CO2 levels are set to reach 422.5 parts per million in 2024, 2.8 parts per million above 2023, and 52% above pre-industrial levels.
No progress over the last three years in curbing global heating, now projected to reach 2.7°C and possibly more
Further underscoring how imperiled the Paris Agreement temperature targets are, Climate Action Tracker’s annual global update finds there has been no improvement since 2021 in limiting global temperature rise, and projects the world will see about 2.7°C of warming by 2100 (with a 50% chance it could be higher or lower).
“But our knowledge of the climate system tells us that there is a 33% chance of our projection being 3.0°C - or higher - and a 10% chance of being 3.6°C or higher, an absolutely catastrophic level of warming,” said Sofia Gonzales-Zuniga of Climate Analytics.
We are clearly failing to bend the curve,” she added. “As the world edges closer to these dangerous climate thresholds, the need for immediate, stronger action to reverse this trend becomes ever more urgent.”
Despite strong growth in renewable energy deployment and electric vehicles, fossil fuel emissions are rising and finance continues to prop up the dirty energy sector. Funding for fossil fuel projects quadrupled between 2021 and 2022 and fossil fuel subsidies are at an all-time high.
The oil and gas industry continues expanding, and in 2023 oil and gas production reached record levels
That’s according to the 2024 update to the Global Oil and Gas Exit List (GOGEL), the most comprehensive public database tracking over 1,700 companies in the oil and gas sector. The annual update is published by Urgewald along with 34 NGO partners.
The 2024 update finds that 95% of companies are still expanding. Upstream companies are collectively spending an average of $61.1 billion on new oil and gas exploration annually, investment that threatens to push global temperature rise far beyond 2°C.
These expansion plans, according to the research, are incompatible not only with the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C goal but also likely with the objective of reaching net zero emissions by 2050. Many oil and gas companies themselves have pledged to achieve net zero emissions by midcentury, but almost two-thirds of the industry’s short-term expansion plans overshoot the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) scenario for net zero emissions by 2050, a GOGEL media briefing explains. The bottom line, then, is that the industry is not transitioning, despite companies’ rhetoric and PR statements claiming they are.
The research further shows that in 2023, oil and gas production amounted to 55.5 billion barrels of oil equivalent, an all-time high that even exceeds the pre-COVID production levels.
“This production record is deeply concerning,” said Nils Bartsch, Head of Oil & Gas Research at Urgewald. “If we do not end fossil fuel expansion and move towards a managed decline of oil and gas production, the 1.5 °C goal will be out of reach.”