At about 10 pm on Saturday evening, a cheer went up among the delegates at the UN climate talks in Katowice, Poland. A deal had been struck on the rules for implementing the Paris climate accord, breathing new life into a pact that aims to limit global warming — and sparing the negotiators another all-night session. But as delegates from almost 200 countries flew home, an uncomfortable truth cast a pall over the agreement: the world is probably going to keep getting warmer anyway.
To see why, one need only take a deep breath in Katowice, once a center for mining where the smell of coal still hangs in the air. In the first week of the summit, new research found global emissions will rise in 2018 at their fastest pace in seven years — the opposite of what is needed to halt warming. Under the Paris accord of 2015, nations committed to limit global warming to less than 2C, a goal that would require slashing emissions to net zero by 2070. The pact also contains a “stretch” goal of 1.5C, which many countries advocate to avoid the worst impacts of warming. Carbon dioxide produced by human activities has already contributed to about 1C of warming compared with pre-industrial times.
In Poland, countries agreed to submit emissions data to the UN every two years starting in 2024, along with new climate targets every five years. They also signed off on a single set of rules for both developed and developing countries (though exemptions are easy to get for countries that cannot comply). With the rules now in place, the world will be able to better measure how well or how poorly it is doing, as it tries to avoid climate catastrophe. But it is still not clear to what extent better measurement will help reduce emissions. So far the commitment by countries is far short of what would be needed to stay on a 2C path.
If current trends continue, by 2030 the gap between actual emissions and the level required to stay below that level will be huge — approximately the size of China’s annual emissions today, according to a UN report. As negotiators pulled one all-nighter after another in Poland, the most important issue of how to actually reduce emissions was often relegated to the sidelines.