Short Wave - This COP29, It's All About The Numbers

Episode Date: November 27, 2024

This year's United Nations climate talks, COP29, wrapped Saturday. Throughout the talks, it was all about the numbers. With the help of NPR climate reporters Julia Simon and Alejandra Borunda, we home in on two. First, $300 billion. That's the amount of money wealthy countries agreed to give developing countries to help them adapt to climate change and reduce pollution. Second, 1.5C. That's a warming limit countries agreed to try not to breach, but that is creeping closer every year. Want to hear the latest in climate news and solutions? Let us know your thoughts by emailing [e-mail]!Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, shortwavers, it's Emily Kwong. And today we are recapping what's basically the Super Bowl of climate policy. I'm talking about the United Nations Climate Change Conference. Every year, leaders from countries gather to negotiate collective agreements about climate change, or at least that's the hope. The 29th one, or COP 29, just wrapped in Azerbaijan, and I hear it was a mess. Is that fair to say?

ended up finishing. Yay. They did it. Okay, here to tell us all about it. Our NPR climate reporter is Julia Simon, who you just heard. Hello. And Alejandra Burunda. Hello, Emily. Julia, set the scene here. What was the goal of the summit this year? This year was really all about the money. How much money wealthy countries would give to developing countries to help them adapt to climate change and reduce their pollution. And as we all know, talking about money is a famously chill and easy thing to do, right? Super chill. This is a really, really fraught topic. It's really fraught because developing countries, they did the least to cause global warming. And they're looking for a big number from wealthy countries to help them do things like buy solar panels and wind turbines, things to help them

move away from fossil fuels. So how much are developing countries getting right now in dollars? Yeah, going into the talks, the number had been $100 billion a year for all developing countries. And if you think about it, this really isn't that much money. In Colombia, they are looking for a plan to transition their economy away from fossil fuels and adapted climate change. They are looking at $40 billion. They're one country. Yeah, this clearly is not enough for all the developing nations of the world. I assume they want more.

Right. Many countries wanted at least $1.3 trillion a year. Wow. But as of late last week, they were not getting anything close to a trillion. As a Friday, the proposed number was $250 billion. Here's the representative from Bolivia responding to that number. This is not even a joke. It is an offense to demands of the global South.

And, Emily, there's another topic that's also been a source of big debate in the climate community and came up this year at the COP a little bit. And that is the number 1.5 degrees Celsius. Oh, like the climate benchmark. 1.5 to stay alive. We must not exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming over pre-industrial times. That number. Exactly. You know what I'm talking about here.

I do, I do. It showed up almost 10 years ago in the Paris Agreement of 2015. And it was the number that a lot of countries agreed to try to keep below in the, like, massive project of trying to limit global warming around the world. Unfortunately, it's getting uncomfortably close. And so there's a lot of chatter happening at conferences like these. where people are starting to ask, is that goal even possible? And if not, what happens? Today on the show, numbers, numbers, numbers galore.

Climate numbers that countries and scientists are thinking a lot about as the world works to limit global warming. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. Okay, Julia and Alejandra, let's talk about the money number first. The number that wealthy countries agreed to give developing countries each year starting in 2035. What dollar figure did they arrive at? Did they even arrive at a number?

I talked to Jessica Green about it. She's a professor of political science at the University of Toronto. So there were all these numbers bandied about, right? And the $1.3 trillion was the one that came from the high-level group on climate finance. It said this is what developing countries and emerging economies need.

The number they got was $300 billion. How are developing countries feeling about that number. I guess at least $300 billion is something. Yeah, it's something. It's very different than $1.3 trillion. Yeah. Here's what

Ankiruka, Madhuquay, a delegate from Nigeria said. $300 billion till 2035 is a joke. And it's not something we should take lightly. I do not think it's something we should clap our hands and

force us to take it. I do not think so. Foof. As Jessica pointed out, this money is not in the form of grants, which is what many countries wanted. It's loans. Oh, so not only is this dollar figure substantially less than developing nations wanted, it's in the form of money they'd have to pay back. Right. And in the long term, these countries might end up with more debt.

Also, here's Maduke again. She mentions the NCQG. That's the acronym for this money. The NCQG was supposed to enable us to have realistic. Finance goals, $300 billion is unrealistic. And what she's talking about in part there is that as part of the Paris Agreement, all these countries have to submit targets for reducing their climate pollution by 2035. And the hope is that all these cuts combined will limit the world's warming to 1.5 degrees

Celsius or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. Okay. What Ankiruka Maduke is pointing out is that, One of the main things this money is supposed to go to is helping countries meet those targets for reducing emissions. Right. You cannot cut emissions without transitioning how you produce energy, transitioning whole parts of your economy, and that costs money. Exactly. You know, you need money to buy solar panels or wind turbines or, you know, close down coal plants. And with less money, that means developing countries can't have as ambitious targets in the first place to reach that 1.1.4. 5 degrees goal, which is a big problem.

Let's talk about the number that is driving this conversation that I'm realizing it is very fraught, 1.5 degrees C, Alejandra, going back in the way back machine. Like, how did all these countries, including us in the U.S., get so focused on that target in the first place? That is a great question, Emily. And basically in short, for many years now, but especially since this big special report by a bunch of scientists in 2018, Scientists have warned that the risks of global warming could get substantially worse once we go past that level of warming, that 1.5C. Okay. This is Lila Warjowski.

She's a researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. The immediately kind of tangible impacts is an increase in the intensity and frequency of extreme events. So what she's talking about here is just that like you get past 1.5 and you get more of the bad stuff that we're already getting. heat waves that are even more intense than those we're having now, which is kind of terrifying, honestly, or stronger hurricanes, that kind of stuff. Yeah, I mean, no one wants stronger hurricanes, the ones this season were truly devastating. Yeah, exactly. And I think the other thing is that there's some even more alarming possibilities once we go past 1.5.

Like, for example, if the Greenland ice sheet melts too much, the melt can actually become unstoppable. There's these processes that keep on going. no matter what we do after that. I used to have a professor back in climate science grad school, and he always would say that we're just running the world's biggest science experiment. Like, let's see what happens when you pump the atmosphere full of carbon dioxide. Let's all stick around to find out.

Okay, so how close are we to that 1.5 degrees Celsius at this moment in time? We are pretty close. If you use the methods laid out in the IPCC, and that's the big scientific consensus report that comes out every few years, that tells us that we're at 1.3 Celsius of warming. 1.3, okay. Not quite there, but close. Yeah, and I just want to be clear that method has an issue. It's fundamentally backwards looking.

Oh. It averages the observed temperature data from the last 10 years with models that look forward the same amount. But baked into that approach is this reality that it won't actually show us crossing 1.5 until a few years after that's already happened. Oh, I had no idea. that's how the math maths. Okay.

I know this number came from science. I respect that. But is there another more real-time way to estimate the warming of the climate? That seems kind of important. Yeah. And you have identified something that many scientists are now working on because they also want to know more quickly. A new study actually just came out right before the COP meeting that uses an approach that is a little more snapshotty. And it says we're probably closer to 1.4C.

And Julia, just piping in here, you might have heard the news that this year, 24, global temperatures are on track to average above 1.5 degrees Celsius for the first time ever. The World Meteorological Association announced that recently. Yeah, and I just, I know that sounds scary, but to be clear, that's not really how anyone thinks about this. It's just one year. And so I just know that temperatures bop around a lot because of things like El Niño or just like a randomly hot year. And so that's why they do that approach that looks at the longer term averages in the first place. But it's also not a great sign. Okay, to summarize, planet Earth, she's warmed, 1.3 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times, maybe closer to 1.4, which is new information for me.

It's alarmingly close to the 1.5 threshold, though. We must not pass in order to avoid some really scary possibilities of global warming. So how should I feel about this? like really, heading into my weekend. Heading into my life, really? It's so hard because the reality is warming past 1.5 really does present these real existential threats to a lot of people around the world.

Like the Pacific Island Nation of Vanuatu, for example, it could literally end up underwater of sea levels rise too far. And that's a real risk. The farther warming gets past 1.5C. Here's Abraham Nasak in their ministry. of climate change. 1.5 is not just a number for our Pacific small island in the European states. It is a line in the sand necessary to ensure our survival.

A line in the sand necessary to ensure our survival. That is as serious as it gets. Like, his people's future depends on this. Yeah. But I think it's also important to know that passing that 1.5 level, it's not like falling off a cliff. It's more like we're playing a dutch. ice game that gets more and more loaded.

Like the probability that bad things happen gets higher. Yeah, exactly. Okay. But I do, I like want to stress that it's not like we wake up one morning past this 1.5 level and have all of these things just like happen at once. Got it. Okay. Andrew Jarvis is a climate scientist at Lancaster University in the UK.

And he's an author of that new study I mentioned before, the one that tells us that we're closer to 1.4 than 1.3. And he's like, honestly, it's very obvious what all of this should tell us. It should remind us that we should probably double down on our efforts. Well, doubling down can happen at COP. Like, this is what the negotiations are for, theoretically. So did folks at the meeting grapple with this part of the science, Julia? Like, did they make any progress toward keeping the goal of 1.5 a reality for the planet?

Well, every cop has their kind of different goal this year was really about money for developing countries. However, those targets that are supposed to add up to 1.5 degrees, they're due in February. So that's coming up. And so there were some countries that at the summit submitted their targets, like Brazil. Brazil says their cuts align with the 1.5 degree goal. Climate policy experts say that's still unclear. Yeah, and there's this, like, other issue kind of lurking here, which is that no one wants to admit that 1.5 might be almost out of reach. I talked with David Victor. He's a professor of innovation and public policy, and specifically he focuses on climate policy at the University of California, San Diego. And he was pretty clear about it. There's a huge political cost to being the first government or the first major firm

saying that the goals are no longer achievable. And so no one wants to bear that political cost, and there's no air cover for them to do something different. And just to clarify, I don't want people listening to lose hope. There are other countries that could have more ambitious goals. There are countries that do have more ambitious goals, like the United Kingdom. They came out with goals that are, quote, unquote, 1.5 degrees aligned. So it is happening.

Yeah, for sure. And I also find it helpful to remember that. that at one point not too long ago, scientists were saying that like four degrees Celsius by the end of the century was on the table. But things have changed. The energy transition has progressed, so has other climate action. And all of that means that the projections they've also come down. And now we're at somewhere around three degrees Celsius or maybe even less. That parts up to us. It's not perfect at all. It's not ideal. But it is progress. Certainly the future has already been altered because people have already been taking action.

It's just a question now of what's going to happen in the next few decades. And at the end of the day, everything we do to curb our emissions as much as possible, that matters. The more we cut, the better it is. This isn't a zero-sum game. Julia, Simon, Alejandro Burunda, thank you for walking us through all of this. Thank you so much. Yeah, great to be here. This episode was produced by Hannah Chin.

It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez and Sadie Babitz. Julia Simon and Alejandra Burunda checked the facts. Gilly Moon was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Emily Kwong. Thank you for listening to Shortwave from NPR.