Climate change worsens in the year of the pandemic, which will not have a UN summit for the first time since 1995

Just a year ago, COP25 began in Madrid, the Climate Summit that was about to vanish after Chile, the organizing country, announced that it could not host the event due to its internal problems. The Spanish government set up the meeting in a hurry to “not lose momentum” in the face of the crucial COP26 of 2020 where countries had to present their new and more ambitious plans to tackle climate change. The COVID-19 pandemic has taken that calendar ahead.

This year there will be no COP. In April 2020, amid the blow of the first pandemic wave, the UN decided to postpone the planned summit in Glasgow (Scotland). Finally, it won’t take place until November 2021, 12 months later than planned. Cop25 already had problems to be held (the Swedish activist Greta Thunberg had to cross the Atlantic by sailboat in a hurry after having sailed to America to go to Chile). But the new coronavirus has punctuated this international meeting: it will be the first year in which it has not been held since it began, in 1995.

But Earth’s climate change, its causes and consequences have not been postponed. Just a week ago, the World Meteorological Organization revealed that, despite the halt caused by COVID-19, “the record levels of greenhouse gases that are trapping heat in the atmosphere have not been cut.” Such high concentrations are what ultimately increase temperatures, cause extreme weather events, raise sea levels and acidify the seas.

While the international climate agenda slowed, global warming escalated without stopping.2020 is presented as a lost year: the UN reported at the end of October that only 15 countries, covering 4.6% of greenhouse gas emissions, had sent improved plans against global warming. When the exam deadline is postponed, the obligations are relaxed.

The pandemic break is not a solution

So, if in 2019 measurements of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere broke the threshold of 410 parts per million (ppm), the growth of this gas has been maintained in 2020. The slowdown in the economy this year will only mean that the increase will be a little smaller, not that the problem is reduced, explain the calculations of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). “In the short term, the impact of COVID-19 lockdowns cannot be differentiated from a natural variation,” says the UN’s Greenhouse Gas Bulletin.

This concentration of gases in the atmosphere causes global warming, so 2020 is another step towards the levels considered by scientists as irreversible. The Paris Agreement against Climate Change seeks to limit that warming to less than 2ºC and as close to 1.5ºC by the year 2100. The heating effect generated by this layer of accumulated gases has risen by 45% since 1990. “The last time the Earth presented a comparable concentration of CO₂ was 3 or 5 million years ago when the global temperature was 2 or 3 ºC higher and the sea level 10 or 20 meters above the current one,” WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas warned when the bulletin was published.

The greenhouse crust that is being measured this 2020 is the result of the accumulation of decades of gas emissions. In the first half of this year, the almost unprecedented measures to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic caused emissions to be reduced by an average of 8.8% compared to the same period of 2019: 1,551 million tons, according to the calculation of a group of experts published in Nature last October. Spain led the decline in relative terms with 16%. With the economic reactivations of the second semester, the forecast is that this fall will revolve around 4-7% at the end of the course. “On a global scale, a reduction of this magnitude will not cause the concentration of carbon dioxide to fall,” the scientists warned.

The _CO2 that reaches the atmosphere today is added to the one that was emitted a long time ago, since it lasts for centuries. There is 148% more _CO2 than in the pre-industrial era (1750). 260% more methane or 123% more nitrous oxide.

A teleconference to try to save the inertia

This year marks five years since the Paris Agreement. It is the date marked by the articles for the signatory States to present climate plans as ambitious as possible and that would represent progress with respect to the intentions declared in that 2015. These documents outline what each one intends to do to stop global warming. The analysis of the first plans resulted in the Earth being 3.4 ºC warmer at the end of the twenty-first century. A level that escapes the latest analysis of the International Panel of Experts on Climate Change (IPCC) that warned about the difference in terms of impacts that would mean curbing warming by two degrees instead of 1.5. Just over a year ago, 11,000 scientists warned of the “untold suffering” predicted by the climate crisis that has arrived earlier, more accelerated and with more serious consequences than expected.

That is why COP26 had been marked as a key moment: “More ambition”, environmental groups such as Ecologists in Action or Greenpeace have insistently called every time a COP was convened. It’s not all bad news, if anything. Over the past three months, China, Japan and South Korea have said they will bring their net _CO2 emissions to zero by 2060 and 2050 respectively. The next US president, Joe Biden, says that achieving that same goal is at the top of his priorities. With that panorama, the organization Climate Action Tracker has calculated on Tuesday that the global temperature at the end of the century would reach 2.1 degrees above the pre-industrial era.

Glasgow 2020 was the time to realize that “ambition” without much room to dodge it, since the Paris Agreement says that “each party must communicate a contribution (…) every five years.” With no summit until 2021, the UN and the British government have sought some formula to try to maintain inertia. That the pace of commitment against climate change does not decline too much. So on December 12 a teleconference of heads of state and government has been set up that they have titled: “The sprint to Glasgow”. There will only be interventions that demonstrate “genuine progress.” An attempt to avoid the empty speeches to which these encounters are so prone. Announced on the poster are French President Emmanuel Macron, China’s Xi Jinping, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and even some U.S. envoys following President-elect Joe Biden’s climate proclamations.

Source: El Diario