World leaders should stop congratulating themselves on the Paris agreement to fight climate change because if more is not done global temperatures will likely hit dangerous warming levels in about 35 years, top scientists are warning.
Six scientists who were leaders in past international climate conferences joined the Universal Ecological Fund in Argentina in releasing a brief report on Thursday, saying that if even more cuts in heat-trapping gases are not agreed upon soon, the world will warm by another 1C by about 2050.
That mark is key because in 2009 world leaders agreed that they wanted to avoid warming of 2C above pre-industrial levels.
Temperatures have already risen about 1C, so that 2C goal is really about preventing a rise of another degree.
Examining the carbon pollution cuts and curbs promised by 190 nations in an agreement made in Paris last December, the scientists said it is simply not enough.
"The pledges are not going to get even close," said report lead author Sir Robert Watson, a University of East Anglia professor and former World Bank chief scientist who used to be chairman of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
"If you governments of the world are really serious, you're going to have to do way, way more."
If carbon pollution continues with just the emission cuts pledged in Paris, earth will likely hit the danger mark by 2050, Watson and colleagues calculated, echoing what other researchers have found.
They said with just a few more cuts, the danger level might be delayed by 20 years,
In Paris, the countries also added a secondary tougher goal of limiting warming to just another 0.5C as an aspiration.
There "is no hope of us stabilising" at that temperature because the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere already commits the world to hitting that mark, Watson said.
Watson said a few weeks ago he was in Washington at an event with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon and former US vice-president Al Gore celebrating the accord as a victory.
"It struck me that this was naive," Watson said.
"This is a real major challenge to stay even close to 2 degrees Celsius."
That 2C danger mark is on a continuum with harmful effects already being felt now at lower warming levels, Watson said, but added, "As you go more and more above two, the negative effects become more and more pronounced, more and more severe."
The report was not published in a scientific journal.
Six outside scientists looked at for The Associated Press and said the science behind it was sound and so were the conclusions.
On Tuesday, scientists at Climate Interactive In Asheville, North Carolina, who were not part of the report, ran a computer simulation using pledges from the Paris agreement and found that dangerous mark arrives about 2051, group co-director Drew Jones said.
