AI Predicts World Over 1.5°C Limit by 2030, Undercuts Climate Progress Reports

Recent studies clash on whether clean technologies and emission cuts can keep the world safely below 1.5°C warming, highlighting how projected climate policy outcomes are shaped by the factors that researchers choose to focus on—and raising questions about the utility of the Paris agreement target.

Stanford University and Colorado State University (CSU) researchers used artificial intelligence to predict warming timelines based on historical temperature observations, instead of previous methods of “extrapolating the recent observed global warming trend or quantifying the time at which different thresholds are reached.” Their projections show the Earth on track to exceed 1.5°C warming above pre-industrial levels by the end of the decade, and there is a 50% chance of warming exceeding 2°C by mid-century, the Guardian reports.

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While the study focused on data from physical climate processes, the Hamburg Climate Outlook, released just days later, assessed 10 social drivers to determine whether the pace of climate action can offset the worst climate outcomes. The researchers concluded that “given our understanding of social dynamics and available empirical evidence, the deep decarbonization scenario is currently not plausible—even though it might still be possible in a technical and physical sense.”

The two studies contrast with other recent projections that point “toward a faster energy transition leading to deeper carbon cuts,” as The Energy Mix reported last week. Even BP’s latest energy outlook study predicts that oil and gas production will fall faster than previously expected, renewable energy will grow more rapidly, and carbon dioxide emissions will fall enough to keep the world in line with the warming limit set in Paris. Meanwhile, BloombergNEF reported that global energy transition investment had exceeded US$1 trillion and equalled the dollars flowing into fossil fuels for the first time, analysts widely predicted a cleantech arms race, and another study by the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) found that fossil use has likely peaked.

All the assessments agree that there is still a lot of ground to cover and that immediate, ambitious action is necessary to rein in climate change. But their sometimes-contrasting outcomes also suggest different future scenarios—hinting at the complexity of the issue and the importance of looking beyond a limited set of factors.

The BP outlook, for instance, focuses on energy sector issues. The report does consider social or political drivers—with notable focus on the Ukraine War and the recently-passed Inflation Reduction Act in the United States—to project future emissions outcomes and renewable energy uptake. As in most modelling studies, only one of its three scenarios is intended to “capture the broad trajectory along which the global energy system is currently travelling”—the other two are aspirational and explore pathways that would result in positive climate outcomes of an energy transition. BP specifies that “the scenarios are not predictions of what is likely to happen or what BP would like to happen,” but are “designed to span a wide range of the outcomes possible out to 2050.”

The RMI study aimed to illuminate the trending rise of renewable energy sources and the fall of fossil fuels, suggesting we are on the precipice of ambitious climate progress as the barriers holding back “the inexorable growth of renewables” are neither “insoluble, immediate, [nor] universal.”

Bloomberg’s reporting on 2022 as “a banner year for money spent on solar and wind projects” evaluated renewables against fossil fossils by comparing investment dollars. The article suggested that more rapid investment would follow—it took eight years to reach the first $1 trillion in renewable investment but “less than four years to reach the next trillion, and a little less than one more year to reach the latest trillion.”

Overall, “one dollar out of every six invested over the last 18 years flowed in 2022.”

However, in the University of Hamburg assessment of social climate action, only seven of ten social drivers were moving in the right direction, none fast enough to achieve the goals of the Paris agreement. Two drivers—corporate responses and global consumption patterns—were actively impairing global climate progress, E&E News says. Researchers also suggested that Russia’s war in Ukraine and the COVID-19 pandemic increased fossil fuel dependence and slowed decarbonization.

“Human agency is strongly shaped by injustices and social inequalities, which inhibit social dynamics toward deep decarbonization by 2050,” they wrote.

But some researchers say the recent conclusion from Stanford and CSU may be too pessimistic. The University of Pennsylvania’s Michael Mann, and Climate Analytics’ Bill Hare and Carl-Friedrich Schleussner, say one rapid decarbonization scenario that wasn’t examined in the study shows the world mostly keeping under the 1.5°C threshold if it can cut emissions in half by 2030, reports the Associated Press. But these scientists’ views are still “essentially in line with the University of Hamburg’s findings: that attitudes and consumption habits, not technical factors, are the main engines pushing global society down its current path toward severe climate disruption,” The Hill says.

While the predictions by BP, Bloomberg, and RMI only claim general climate progress, the outcomes described by the University of Hamburg and by Stanford and CSU come across as pessimistic because they’re framed to identify the likelihood of reaching the specific target of limiting global warming to 1.5°C or 2.0°C.

Believing the world can no longer keep warming below 1.5°C “is a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Mann asserted. “In the end, it’s easy to overinterpret the significance of a precise threshold like 1.5°C warming,” he said. “The challenge is to limit warming as much as possible.”

Last summer, Béatrice Cointe from the Centre for the Sociology of Innovation and Hélène Guillemot from the Centre Alexandre Koyré gave some insight into how the 1.5°C target shapes the “co-dependency” of climate science and policy in an article that dissected the target’s history as a product of diplomacy and politics, rather than from science. They concluded that “political objectives require scientific backing to be legitimate, and research needs to attune to political discussions if it is to remain policy relevant.”

“The question remains whether the exacerbation of contradictions brought by the 1.5°C objective serves the fight against climate change, and whether it is tenable.”

Or, as paraphrased Emma Marris for The Atlantic, “science informs policy. But policy shapes science, too.”