Climate Matters•October 27, 2021

COP26

COP26

KEY CONCEPTS

Interviews for COP26

Climate Central will be at COP26 and available for interviews. Please contact pgirard@climatecentral.org to set up an interview. Dates and times are listed below:

COP26 REPORTING RESOURCES

2100 Temp Projections Map - COP26
2100 Temp Projections Map
Local Temperature Projections - COP26

The highly anticipated 26th annual United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP26, begins in just a few days. The conference will be held in Glasgow, Scotland from October 31 to November 12. We put together a short guide on the who, what, and why of COP26 to help make sense of this historic event: 

What is COP26?
COP26 is the 26th annual Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change—an international event where world leaders come together to advance climate goals, including those agreed upon in 2015 at COP21. During COP21, nations of the world adopted the Paris Agreement to hold global average temperatures to well below 2°C (3.6°F) above pre-industrial levels, and to pursue efforts to limit warming to 1.5°C (2.7°F). To keep these long-term and global goals on track, the Paris Agreement requires all Parties to propose their own plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions—and to increase their ambition every 5 years (COP26 was postponed from 2020 to 2021 because of the pandemic). COP26 will review these initial commitments, called Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), and will also see Parties update their NDCs, setting the tone for future action. 

Who participates at COP26? World leaders and senior government officials from nearly 200 countries will be the main participants in negotiating and making decisions during the conference. Members of the press and media, businesses, academia, and nonprofit organizations (including Climate Central) will also be in attendance.

Why is COP26 important to you? 
Climate change is already affecting our lives and livelihoods. Its impacts on human health, agriculture, extreme weather, coastal inundations and more are disrupting communities across the globe—including your own community. COP26 is important because the choices made by world leaders over the next two weeks will influence warming in your own backyard, during the lifetimes of people already living as well as future generations.

To bring the global view down to the local level, Climate Central produced temperature projections to the year 2100 for 246 locations across the U.S. Our local projections used the latest generation of climate models and different greenhouse gas emission scenarios to compare two futures: a world where emissions continue on their current path (SSP3-7.0), and a world with aggressive emissions cuts (SSP1-2.6) that stay within the Paris Agreement limits of 2°C of global warming this century (see Methodology for details). The results show:

So what’s at stake with future warming? Explore the impacts of rising carbon dioxide levels, rising temperatures, and rising seas in your local area with the following tools:

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Picturing Our Future

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Climate and Health Toolkit

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Urban Heat Islands

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Western Fire Weather

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More Mosquito Days

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Disaster Fatigue

Additional warming by 2050 is nearly inevitable, but we have a choice in determining how much warming we will see in the future. Today, the global average temperature sits at 1.26°C (2.27°F) higher than in 1850. And current stated policies put us on a path toward 2.6°C (4.7°F) of warming by 2100—overshooting the Paris Agreement goal of 2°C. This is why COP26 is so important. In order to reach our global goal, each country needs to continually adopt—and implement—more-ambitious emission-reduction plans. 

But that is easier said than done. The Paris Agreement demands one of the largest global transformations, physically and behaviorally, the world has ever undertaken. And according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Sixth Assessment Report, meeting the 1.5°C target is not impossible but is becoming increasingly difficult as time passes with limited action. Any additional warming worsens the risks that climate change poses to people and the natural world. 

POTENTIAL LOCAL STORY ANGLES

How do I cover COP26 for my community?
Below is a list of resources for media coverage on COP26:

What are the most important climate impacts in my area?
The newly released report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has a section dedicated to North America in Chapter 12 that assesses the continent’s changing climate. For more in-depth analysis on regions within the U.S., check out the Fourth U.S. National Climate Assessment (NCA) from 2018. In the report, you can find a breakdown of the most relevant climate impacts in 10 distinct US regions and the impacts on different sectors like agriculture, oceans, and human health.

LOCAL EXPERTS 

The SciLine service, 500 Women Scientists or the press offices of local universities may be able to connect you with local scientists who have expertise on climate change. The American Association of State Climatologists is a professional scientific organization composed of all 50 state climatologists. 

NATIONAL EXPERTS 

METHODOLOGY

We downloaded data from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 6 (CMIP6) repository and created time series for each of the stations for which we routinely prepare Climate Matters analyses. For each station, the data consist of monthly temperatures estimated by 35 models under SSP1-2.6 (low CO2) and SSP3-7.0 (high CO2) scenarios. The data were averaged for each year and then the time series were smoothed to emphasize the change in the average conditions, rather than year-to-year variability. For each station, we next combined the models to estimate the median temperature and confidence intervals for the two scenarios. Thus, if a graphic shows a temperature of 65°F in 2050 for a particular scenario, that means that if CO2 emissions play out as depicted in the scenario, then the temperature in the years around 2050 should average out to 65°F. Any particular year could be above or below this value.  For a more detailed methodology, see here.