Don’t risk temperature overshoot, climate science reaffirms

If the world continues to push their climate goals ever farther into the future, humanity risks to overshoot the temperature red line of two degrees. Cooling our planet back down is a gargantuan effort, more so as it remains largely nebulous how to clear carbon from the atmosphere on such planetary scales. A group of international researchers coordinated by IIASA, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria, has added more arguments for avoiding to stray into such dangerous territory:

“The study for the first time systematically compares scenarios that avoid overshoot across models. Rapid emissions cuts in the next few decades would mean that there is no need to go net-negative: instead, global temperatures would plateau at a given level around the time we reach net-zero emissions. We also found that models agree on many implications for regional energy systems like the rapid decarbonization of the power sector,” says Christoph Bertram, a study coauthor from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK).

Article: Riahi, K., Bertram, C., Huppmann, D., Rogelj, J., Bosetti, V., Cabardos, A-M., Deppermann, A., Drouet, L., et al. (2021). Cost and attainability of meeting stringent climate targets without overshoot. Nature Climate Change. DOI: 10.1038/s41558-021-01215-2