For all the less-than-encouraging news about climate change—rapid sea-level rise, the land itself transforming, serious trouble brewing under Antarctic glaciers—we’ve been getting plenty of hope. The price of renewable energy is crashing, for example, and we’re moving toward a cleaner, electrified future faster than you may realize.
That shift is clear in a darn near uplifting paper that publishes today in the journal Nature: Modeling by an international team of scientists shows that if nations uphold their recent climate pledges, including those made at COP26, humanity may keep warming under 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the goal outlined in the Paris Agreement. It isn’t under the 1.5-degree threshold we’d really want (the agreement’s more optimistic goal), but it’s far from the extreme warming of 3, 4, or even 5 degrees, as some scenarios projected prior to the agreement. And it will only happen if nations carry out their promises to quickly decarbonize their economies—which isn’t guaranteed.
“Those very high emissions trajectories that people used to talk about don't look quite so likely today,” says Christophe McGlade, head of the energy supply unit at the International Energy Agency and a coauthor of the new paper. “It's a bit of good news because it shows that the world has made progress in terms of policy and technology over the past few years.”
To land on this rosier scenario of under 2 degrees of warming, McGlade and his colleagues scrutinized climate pledges that nearly 200 countries made between the Paris Agreement, which was signed in 2015, and the end of the COP26 conference last November. These are known as “net-zero” pledges. The US, for example, has committed to net zero by the year 2050, meaning that by then it will be putting as much carbon into the atmosphere as it’s removing. This is a rather sticky concept, in that a country can keep emitting greenhouse gasses as long as it’s also sequestering them with carbon removal technologies. These exist, but not at anywhere near the scale required to make a dent in atmospheric carbon concentrations. Countries could (and should) also bolster ecosystems that naturally sequester carbon in growing plants, thus offsetting emissions.
The researchers used all of those pledges to estimate global emissions in the future, then plugged that into a climate model, which calculated a temperature rise of under 2 degrees by the year 2100. (For reference, we’re already at about 1.2 degrees above pre-industrial levels.) “What this shows is that if governments achieve what they have said they want to achieve in terms of their net-zero pledges, this will be the first time that we would limit warming to below 2 degrees Celsius,” says McGlade. “There's never been enough policy commitments, or enough policy momentum, up to the COP26 conference that would have limited warming to below 2 degrees.”
In addition to that political movement, several trends have been converging to make this progress possible. For one thing, the costs of solar and wind power, as well as lithium-ion batteries to store electricity, cratered by up to 85 percent between 2010 and 2019, according to the most recent UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. “It's really been very, very impressive and is one of the key reasons why we actually get this result in the paper,” says McGlade. “In many cases, it's cheaper to deploy a new wind farm or a new solar farm than to deploy a new coal-fired power plant. That's the case in many, many places around the world today.”
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Also, those earlier scenarios predicting extreme warming were pieced together when the use of coal was skyrocketing. “A decade ago, the world looked like it was in a pretty bad place,” says Zeke Hausfather, climate research lead at Stripe and coauthor of a Nature commentary that accompanied the new study. “Global coal use had almost doubled over the course of 10 years, primarily driven by China, and global emissions had increased by a third. And the idea that the 21st century might be the century of coal didn't seem that far-fetched.”
Instead, coal use peaked in 2013, Hausfather adds, and has since then been regularly replaced with natural gas, which spews less carbon. More dramatically, coal is getting pushed out by ever-cheaper renewables—the ultimate driver of an eventual carbon-free economy. At the same time, demand for electric vehicles is soaring. “No one expected we'd have an 8.5x decline in costs in just 10 years for both solar panels and batteries,” says Hausfather. “And so that's really accelerated the energy transition, even at the same time that we haven't seen quite the level of policy ambition—to put it mildly—that all of us had hoped for.”
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There are some major caveats, though. For one, there isn’t good agreement about what net zero even means. Some countries, for instance, only talk about mitigating carbon dioxide, but others are also talking about tackling methane, an even more potent greenhouse gas. Also, it’s not clear yet how nations will sequester carbon at scale. And of course countries have to actually make good on those pledges. “We should treat those commitments with the proverbial boulder of salt,” says Hausfather. “It's easy to commit to do something 30 to 50 years from now, when most of the leaders involved won't be in power, or, for that matter, alive. It's a lot harder to actually do stuff in the next decade that builds clean energy on the ground and puts countries really on track to get to net zero.”
That’ll vary country to country, and even within a country from year to year, due to turnovers in political leadership. For example, the Trump administration pulled the United States out of the Paris Agreement, only to have the Biden administration rejoin. But even now, Democrats control the White House and Congress and yet struggle to pass climate legislation. International happenings can also shape energy policy. In Europe, the energy crisis stemming from Russia’s war in Ukraine could accelerate the continent’s weaning off of oil and gas, and it underscores the rationale for Ukraine’s push to separate itself from the Russian power grid. But then again, it could make coal more appealing—and the prospect of an increasingly militarized Europe means more emissions from the machines of war, a potential distraction from net-zero commitments. “The ability of countries to actually meet these commitments depends a lot on the particularities of their domestic politics,” says Hausfather, “and their ability to pass legislation that puts them on track to do so.”
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On top of political turmoil, there’s an inherent uncertainty in climate models that calculate temperature increases based on emissions. Scientists can’t perfectly represent Earth’s wildly complex carbon cycle, and it’s always possible X-factors could arise. Researchers may get surprised if, say, underwater permafrost thaws and burps up greenhouse gasses, increasing warming and throwing off existing models.In any case, humanity is running out of time to massively reduce emissions. Last summer’s IPCC report found that we’re on track to hit that 1.5 degree threshold about a decade earlier than expected—by the early or mid-2030s. It also noted that at 1.5 degrees, extreme heat waves will happen five times as often as they do now, but will happen 14 times as often if the world warms 2 degrees. Meanwhile, the frequency of once-in-a-decade droughts will double or triple at 2 degrees.
So while the half a degree C between 1.5 and 2 doesn’t sound like much, each tiny fraction of a degree of warming will trigger massive changes—fiercer droughts, decreased crop yields, stronger storms—deepening the hole we have to dig ourselves out of. “Every .1 degree matters so much. You need to deploy so many more electric cars, so much more solar power,” says Haewon McJeon, senior economist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, who wasn’t involved in the new paper. Every bit of decarbonization will bring down what will eventually be peak warming. “At least on paper, we came down from 4 degrees to 3 degrees and now to 2 degrees,” McJeon adds. “I think this is an important moment that we should emphasize.”
McGlade’s take on the new study is also optimistic: that there’s a pathway to avoiding the worst outcomes predicted by earlier scenarios. He notes that in addition to national net-zero commitments, industry is also getting involved. “Thanks to the pledges that companies are also putting in place, when you put all of these things together, it can add up to a trajectory for emissions that is at least bringing us in the right direction, even if it is a long way away from where we want to be,” says McGlade.
For Hausfather, it’s a reminder to keep pushing, to make sure that countries not only honor their pledges but set even more ambitious goals as the price of renewables keeps plunging. “There is good news here—the world is moving away from some of the darkest climate futures,” says Hausfather. “And at the same time, we need to recognize that there's a huge gap between our ambition and our actions. Just because countries say they're going to get to net zero, doesn't mean they're going to get to net zero. So it's our job now to keep their feet to the fire.”
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