World On Track for Hefty Temperature Increase This Century

If the world continues down its current carbon-spewing course, global temperatures will hit a staggering 4.8 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels by the end of the century, with potentially disastrous consequences for humanity, ecosystems and sustainable development, according to a new report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

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The report, "Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change," is the third of three Working Group Reports, which make up the IPCC's fifth Assessment Report on climate change. Produced by 235 authors from 58 countries, the report analyzed close to 1,200 climate scenarios investigating the economic, technological and institutional requirements for meeting global climate goals.

Based on this analysis, the report found that stabilizing global temperature rise at 2 degrees Celsius over preindustrial temperatures—the limit considered by many scientists to be safe — will require lowering greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) by as much as 70 percent compared to 2010 numbers by mid-century and reaching near-zero emissions by 2100.

Between 2000 and 2010, global GHG emissions increased by the equivalent of 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide (CO2), the report says. Half of all human CO2 emissions between 1750 and 2010 have occurred in the last 40 years. Mashable recently reported that the amount of CO2 in Earth's atmosphere has, for the first time, exceeded 402 parts per million (ppm) — higher than at any time in at least the past 800,000 years. CO2 is one of the longest-lived GHGs, which means the emissions that have and continue to pump into the atmosphere will remain there for centuries.

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Read the report at IPCC.

Thermometer image via Shutterstock.