Climate researcher Ottmar Edenhofer expects that the global average temperature will probably exceed the 1.5 degree limit of the Paris Agreement for decades. “We will have to accept that there will be an overshoot of the temperature for several decades,” said the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Deutschlandfunk’s “Interview of the Week,” which will be broadcast on Sunday. With luck it could work “that we bend this temperature curve back to 1.5 degrees around the end of the century.”
The international community has agreed on the 1.5 degree target in order to avoid exceeding dangerous tipping points with irreversible consequences and to avert the most catastrophic consequences of climate change. The aim is to limit global warming to as much as 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the earth has already heated up by around 1.1 degrees compared to pre-industrial times; in Germany it is even 1.6 degrees.
Lowering the average temperature will only be successful “if we can remove CO2 from the atmosphere on a large scale, in other words, if we generate net negative emissions,” said Edenhofer.
The Federal Constitutional Court’s budget ruling on Wednesday tore a 60 billion euro hole in the financing of the federal government’s climate projects. According to Edenhofer, the traffic light coalition is forced to set priorities. “So it either has to cut spending, reprioritize and restructure its spending, or it has to resort to tax increases, for example further increasing the CO2 price,” said the climate researcher. According to Edenhofer, it could be that opponents of the CO2 price will reconsider their position after the ruling. This could close part of the financing gap.
The Federal Constitutional Court had assessed the use of Corona loans for climate projects as unconstitutional.
