Current fossil fuel infrastructure does not yet commit us to 1.5 °C warming

Christopher J. Smith (), Piers M. Forster, Myles Allen, Jan Fuglestvedt, Richard J. Millar, Joeri Rogelj and Kirsten Zickfeld
Additional contact information
Christopher J. Smith: University of Leeds
Piers M. Forster: University of Leeds
Myles Allen: Oxford University Centre for the Environment
Jan Fuglestvedt: CICERO
Richard J. Millar: Oxford University Centre for the Environment
Joeri Rogelj: International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)
Kirsten Zickfeld: Simon Fraser University

Nature Communications, 2019, vol. 10, issue 1, 1-10

Abstract: Abstract Committed warming describes how much future warming can be expected from historical emissions due to inertia in the climate system. It is usually defined in terms of the level of warming above the present for an abrupt halt of emissions. Owing to socioeconomic constraints, this situation is unlikely, so we focus on the committed warming from present-day fossil fuel assets. Here we show that if carbon-intensive infrastructure is phased out at the end of its design lifetime from the end of 2018, there is a 64% chance that peak global mean temperature rise remains below 1.5 °C. Delaying mitigation until 2030 considerably reduces the likelihood that 1.5 °C would be attainable even if the rate of fossil fuel retirement was accelerated. Although the challenges laid out by the Paris Agreement are daunting, we indicate 1.5 °C remains possible and is attainable with ambitious and immediate emission reduction across all sectors.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-07999-w Abstract (text/html)

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:nat:natcom:v:10:y:2019:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-018-07999-w

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-07999-w

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().