“Things are accelerating at a pace that we probably did not anticipate and which is beyond us”, estimated Tuesday May 10 on franceinfo François Gemenne, specialist in climate governance and migration, director of the Hugo observatory at the University of Liège, teacher at Sciences Po and the Sorbonne, and co-author at the Giec. According to a new climate bulletin published on Monday by the United Nations World Meteorological Organization (WMO), there is a one in two chance that the 1.5°C threshold will be exceeded in the next five years.
franceinfo: What exactly does this figure mean? What exactly does this UN finding imply?
Francois Gemenne: We know that in reality we are going to exceed over the next few years this objective of 1.5°C, included in the Paris agreements. And in the best case we will bring the temperature down to 1.5°C towards the end of the century, it would be the most optimistic scenario that we have today. This means that you have to be prepared to exceed 1.5°C and probably even exceed 2°C. There is an urgent need to prepare adaptation plans and we must stop living in this world of Alice in Wonderland where everything is going to be fine and where we are going to escape the impacts of climate change. We will exceed these targets no matter what.
The probability of being exceeded was 10% between 2017 and 2021. It was close to zero in 2015. Does it surprise you, you who are the co-author of the latest IPCC report, that this probability has increased so quickly?
Things are accelerating at a pace that we probably hadn’t anticipated and which is beyond us. I had stuck with the idea that we were going to reach around 1.5°C around 2030-2035, but that will probably happen before that. Somehow, this further reinforces the idea of the absolute necessity of planning adaptation plans. I repeat, I hammer it, we will not escape the impacts of climate change. You have to prepare for it. Even if we were to miraculously manage – and today I would say there is a one in a hundred chance that we will achieve the objectives of the Paris agreement – we will exceed this temperature threshold during the century to perhaps return to it towards the end of the century or the beginning of the 22nd century.
Can we stop at this figure of 1.5°C, it was obviously not chosen by chance?
Nope ! This is a claim of small island states. Many of them are coral atolls just a few meters above sea level. They know that 2°C rise in temperature equals one meter rise in sea level. the sea. This means that many of their territories will be submerged and will become uninhabitable. As early as 2009, at the COP15 in Copenhagen, they had asked that we choose the objective of 1.5°C for somewhere, to guarantee the habitability of their territories. And already in 2009, we said it, “It’s no longer possible, it’s too late, it’s dead”. They came back to the charge at COP21 in 2015 and there they were kind of pleased: we agreed to integrate this 1.5°C objective and this objective, little by little, became the political objective major. But we must realize that we knew from the start that this objective would be almost impossible to achieve, except to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
And if we exceed these 1.5°C, the effects on the climate will be more and more harmful?
They will be more and more harmful both for us because extreme climatic events like intense precipitation or heat waves will become more and more frequent and more and more intense. We have to realize that today, when we are already seeing these impacts of climate change, we are only 1.2°C from an increase in temperature. And that means above all, for the small island states, that some of them will be submerged and that their territory will disappear, probably forever. Which obviously raises a lot of questions about where we will relocate the people. And as for the possibility for these countries to retain their statehood since their territory will have disappeared.