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

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.

Metadata

Item Type:	Article
Authors/Creators:	Smith, CJ https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0599-4633 Forster, PM https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6078-0171 Allen, M Fuglestvedt, J Millar, RJ Rogelj, J Zickfeld, K
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information:	© The Author(s) 2019. Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Keywords:	climate change; Paris Agreement; fossil fuels; infrastructure; committed warming; net zero
Dates:	Accepted: 7 December 2018 Published (online): 15 January 2019 Published: 15 January 2019
Institution:	The University of Leeds
Academic Units:	The University of Leeds > Faculty of Environment (Leeds) > School of Earth and Environment (Leeds) > Inst for Climate & Atmos Science (ICAS) (Leeds)
Funding Information:	Funder Grant number NERC NE/N006038/1
Depositing User:	Symplectic Publications
Date Deposited:	16 Jan 2019 13:14
Last Modified:	18 Apr 2019 11:13
Status:	Published
Publisher:	Nature Research
Identification Number:	10.1038/s41467-018-07999-w
Related URLs:	Dataset
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID):	oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:141110

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

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

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