The political reckoning is coming soon. Chances are rapidly disappearing to limit Earth’s temperature rise to the globally agreed mark.

When representatives from 197 countries arrive in Dubai this month for the latest round of climate negotiations, they will have to confront a basic question: are nations meeting the goal they set of limiting global warming to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels?

At first glance, it seems that nations have no chance of meeting the Paris agreement’s headline goal of limiting warming to 1.5 °C. The rate of warming has picked up over the past decade, and the average global temperature for 2023 is likely to be 1.4 °C above the average for 1850–1900 (See the chart below)

At this rate, it could be less than a decade — possibly much sooner — before global warming reaches 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels. Natural variations, such as the current El Niño warming in the tropical Pacific, can significantly influence temperatures in the short term.

It won’t stop there. Models that use projected carbon emissions estimate that global temperatures will increase by 2.4–2.6 °C above pre-industrial values by 2100.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) uses 10- and 20-year rolling averages when it calculates Earth’s surface temperature. This means there can be a long lag between the official IPCC estimate of global warming and the average temperatures in any given year.

Delay doesn't pay. One thing is clear: the longer we wait, the harder it becomes to achieve the Paris goals.

The world would need to reduce carbon emissions by 8% each year between now and 2034 to maintain a 50% chance of staying below 1.5 °C of warming. By comparison, it took a global pandemic to reduce carbon emissions by 7% in 2020.

Scientists and businesses are pursuing a range of often-controversial options for removing carbon from the atmosphere, also known as negative emissions. Some focus on nature-based activities, such as planting forests and subtly altering ocean chemistry, to promote carbon uptake. Others use industrial solutions, including capturing and burying emissions from power plants and steel mills or extracting CO2 directly from the atmosphere.

The problem is that none of the carbon-removal methodologies has been demonstrated at anything close to a climate-relevant scale, and the potential knock-on effects are often poorly understood. Even planting forests, for instance, can harm biodiversity or inflate food prices through the loss of agricultural land. But with enough investment and research, many scientists expect that negative emissions will ultimately have to play a part.

Assuming a cost of US$100 per ton to extract CO2 from the atmosphere, a common target for carbon-removal technologies, it would cost some $22 trillion to sequester enough carbon to reduce global temperatures by just 0.1 °C. That is roughly 16 times more than the annual climate expenditures by governments and businesses worldwide last year.

To achieve the Paris agreement goals, many models analysed by the IPCC suggest that the world will need to go beyond eliminating carbon emissions. Within the next 2 decades nations will probably need to extract carbon out of the atmosphere to limit warming to 2 °C.

After a one-year dip caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels hit a new high of 37.2 billion tonnes last year. Rates of renewable energy generation are also surging, however, and many energy experts now consider the transition away from fossil fuels all but inevitable. This is one of the few bright spots heading into COP28.

The expansion of solar energy is responsible for much of the emissions reductions, relative to the pre-Paris baseline forecast. Wind power and the rapid increase in the number of electric vehicles are also helping to drive down emissions. The bottom line is that we’ve reached a point where the growth of clean energy technologies is really hard to stop.

The path ahead is daunting. Electricity from renewables and other low-emission sources will need to increase by almost sevenfold to nearly 77 trillion terawatt hours annually by 2050, according to the International Energy Agency. Generation from coal, gas and oil must drop to almost zero by 2040, unless accompanied by technologies that capture and somehow sequester carbon from the atmosphere.

To achieve this transformation, the IEA projects that wind and solar would need to account for roughly 70% of electricity production by 2050. Low-carbon sources of electricity will need to increase by about sevenfold, producing more than four times as much electricity in 2050 as coal, natural gas and oil generate today.

But that’s the easiest part. Much more complex will be cleaning up sectors such as heavy industry, aviation and long-haul transport — as well as agriculture and food systems. And nations need to reduce emissions of other greenhouse gases, too.

Industrialized countries in the global north are responsible for the bulk of the greenhouse gases that have accumulated in the atmosphere. The United States and Europe, for example, have emitted 37% of the historical total. But emissions from the wealthiest Western countries have been declining for decades, whereas the share from other nations has soared. China is now the world’s largest CO2 emitter, and just this year India’s CO2 emissions passed those of the European Union.

A flash of good news, a step change, going into COP28: global climate investments — including both private and public spending — skyrocketed to $1.1 trillion in 2021 and $1.4 trillion in 2022, according to the latest analysis from the Climate Policy Initiative (CPI), an international advocacy group. All told, that represents a near doubling from the previous two years.

The world will need to increase climate spending to around $9 trillion annually by 2030 and to nearly $11 trillion by 2035 to roll out clean sources of energy and prepare for the inevitable impacts of a warming climate during the next few decades. More money will also need to flow to low-income countries.

There is more than enough funding floating around: governments invested nearly $12 trillion in economic relief during the COVID-19 pandemic, and are currently spending more than $1 trillion per year on direct fossil fuel subsidies (or $7 trillion if indirect incentives such as regulatory relief are included). Rolling those subsidies back is no simple matter because of the potential effects on the world’s poorest citizens, but it is yet another source of money as the world looks to the future.

Climate investments are increasing in both the public and private sectors, and renewable sources of energy are displacing fossil fuels at historic rates in many countries. But progress is much too slow, and by almost any measure the world is falling far short of the 1.5 °C goal. Greenhouse-gas emissions are at an all-time high, tropical forests are being chopped down at near-record rates, fossil-fuel subsidies are going up and coal-fired power stations are still being built.

As with so many things, the question once again boils down to choices. “If you put effort into it, things can happen,” she says. “It’s just a matter of urgency and political will.”

Remember, the team of Government representatives, led by elected politicians, who participate in the apex policy making bodies are empowered though your votes to decide the future of this planet. It is the duty of every informed citizen to create awareness amongst the leaders who seek mandates to govern, as well as the people who cast their votes. Politics is integral to the survival of this planet, the human race and everything inside this blue spaceship -Earth.