Keeping warming within the 2 °C limit after Copenhagen

Andrew Macintosh

Energy Policy, 2010, vol. 38, issue 6, 2964-2975

Abstract: The object of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December 2009 was to reach an agreement on a new international legal architecture for addressing anthropogenic climate change post-2012. It failed in this endeavour, producing a political agreement in the form of the Copenhagen Accord. The Accord sets an ambitious goal of holding the increase in the global average surface temperature to below 2 °C. This paper describes 45 CO2-only mitigation scenarios that provide an indication of what would need to be done to stay within the 2 °C limit if the international climate negotiations stay on their current path. The results suggest that if developed countries adopt a combined target for 2020 of =5%/yr, and possibly >=10%/yr, post-2030 (after a decade transitional period) in order to keep warming to 2 °C. If aggressive abatement commitments for 2020 are not forthcoming from all the major emitting countries, the likelihood of warming being kept within the 2 °C limit is diminutive.

Keywords: Climate; change; Mitigation; International; climate; negotiations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301-4215(10)00059-5
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:enepol:v:38:y:2010:i:6:p:2964-2975

Access Statistics for this article

Energy Policy is currently edited by N. France

More articles in Energy Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().