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How the world has changed since the Paris Climate Pact

By cynthia.hill

Published Mar 17, 2016 4:29 PM EDT | Updated Nov 7, 2019 3:56 AM EDT

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National leaders have yet to sign a new United Nations climate pact, but developments during the three months since the Paris Agreement was finalized have been feverish.

The fate of electricity rules underpinning U.S. commitments under the pact has been thrown into doubt, new data suggests China may have already hit its targets, and Europe has been embroiled in a debate over whether its climate commitments are sufficiently aggressive.

The recent developments suggest momentum is still building in many places toward a meaningful global solution to global warming. Meanwhile, searing new temperature records demonstrated the increasing urgency of the problem.

The Paris Agreement was notable for being high on ambition. It aims to keep warming “well below” 2°C (3.6°F) above pre-industrial averages, and to “pursue efforts” to curb it to 1.5°C. But national pledges made under it fall well short of the actions needed to actually meet those ambitious targets.

Temperatures have risen 1°C since the 1800s. The national pledges that underpinned the pact would allow temperatures to blow well past the new targets in the decades ahead, afflicting humanity with ever-worsening heatwaves, floods and mosquito-borne epidemics.

Experts hope future rounds of U.N. climate negotiations will see nations ratchet up their pledges, helping them meet the temperature and clean energy targets established under the Paris Agreement, which at least 80 countries are expected to ratify on April 22.

Here’s a quick trip around the world, showing what’s changed since the Paris Agreement was finalized in mid-December.

The World

The relatively good news overall is new data showing that annual rates of emissions of the world’s main greenhouse gas may be stabilizing, though not yet falling. One of the goals of the Paris Agreement is to pursue “rapid reductions” to yearly pollution output following a plateau.

Preliminary International Energy Agency figures published Wednesday showed 35 billion tons of carbon dioxide pollution was released in 2015 -- about the same amount that was released in 2014, which was similar to the amount from 2013.

“In the more than 40 years in which the IEA has been providing information on CO2 emissions, there have been only four periods in which emissions stood still or fell compared to the previous year,” the agency said. “Three of those – the early 1980s, 1992 and 2009 – were associated with global economic weakness. But the recent stall in emissions comes amid economic expansion.”

The bad news since December has been record-smashing global temperatures. Not only was 2015 the hottest on record, boosted by greenhouse gas pollution and warm phases in ocean cycles, but the first month of 2016 was the warmest January on record. A month after that, February was the most unusually warm month in 135 years of NASA records.

United States

The past three months have been a wild ride for President Obama’s highest-profile -- and most important -- set of rules designed to help the nation meet its Paris pledge.

The U.S. EPA’s Clean Power Plan would impose limits on greenhouse gas emissions from the nation’s heavily polluting power sector. The rules were crafted to bypass the Republican-controlled Congress, but they’re being challenged in court by conservative states and fossil fuel companies.

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