Carrying out the Paris climate change agreement will be a challenge

This content was originally posted in 7DAYS UAE website at: Carrying out the Paris climate change agreement will be a challenge The world is about to go on a carbon diet. It won’t be easy – or cheap. Nearly 200 nations across the world on Saturday approved a first-of-its-kind universal agreement to wean Earth off fossil fuels and slow global warming, patting themselves on the back for showing such resolve. Sunday morning, like for many first day dieters, the reality set in. The numbers – like calorie limits and hours needed in the gym – are daunting. How daunting? Try more than 7 billion tonnes. That’s how much carbon dioxide needs to stay in the ground instead of being spewed into the atmosphere for those reductions to happen, even if you take the easier of two goals mentioned in Saturday’s deal. To get to the harder goal, it’s even larger numbers. In the pact, the countries pledged to limit global warming to about another degree Celsius from now – and if they can, only half that. Another, more vague, goal is that by sometime in the second half of the century, man-made greenhouse gas emissions – which includes methane and other heat-trapping gases as well as carbon dioxide – won’t exceed the amount that nature absorbs. In practice, that means the world has to emit close to zero greenhouse gases by 2070 to reach the easier goal, or by 2050 to reach the harder one, said John Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. Oh and by the way, the harder goal – limit warming by another half a degree Celsius – is probably already impossible, said Joeri Rogelj at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria. RELATED: UAE backs global climate change deal Most likely the best the world can hope for is overshooting that temperature by a few tenths of a degree then somehow slowly – over decades if not centuries – come back to the target temperature. Leading up to the Paris Agree­ment, nearly every nation formed an individual action plan to cut or at least slow the growth of carbon pollution over the next decade or so. Richer nations that have already developed, like the United States, Europe and Japan, pledged to cut now. Developing nations that say they need fossil fuels to pull themselves out poverty pledged to slow the rate of growth for now, and to cut later. “The EU and US are all on Slim-Fast,” said Paul Bledsoe, a former Clinton administration climate official. “China’s still hitting fast food, but will have to stop soon.” Without any efforts to limit global warming, the world would have warmed by 3.5 degrees Celsius from now by 2100, according to Climate Interactive. Countries agreed on Saturday to take another look at their goals every five years. “Clearly countries must be exercising their low-carbon muscles more,” said Rachel Cleetus, climate policy manager for the Union of Concern Scientists. French President Francois Hollande said his country would ratchet up its goals and efforts earlier than required and challenged other nations to do the same. news@7days.ae Read the original story at: Carrying out the Paris climate change agreement will be a challenge