It's close, but it's also a win for the global environment.
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won Brazil’s presidential election on Sunday, defeating far-right President Jair Bolsonaro in a heated contest during which the incumbent repeatedly threatened to dismantle the world’s fourth-largest democracy.
Brazil’s Superior Electoral Tribunal called the race for da Silva just before 7 p.m. Eastern time, with the leftist holding a narrow 50.83% to 48.17% lead with more than 98% of votes counted.
The World Meteorological Organization reports that greenhouse gas concentrations reached the highest levels since records began.
WMO’s Greenhouse Gas Bulletin reported the biggest year-on-year jump in methane concentrations in 2021 since systematic measurements began nearly 40 years ago. The reason for this exceptional increase is not clear, but seems to be a result of both biological and human-induced processes.
The increase in carbon dioxide levels from 2020 to 2021 was larger than the average annual growth rate over the last decade. Measurements from WMO’s Global Atmosphere Watch network stations show that these levels continues to rise in 2022 over the whole globe.
Between 1990 and 2021, the warming effect on our climate (known as radiative forcing) by long-lived greenhouse gases rose by nearly 50%, with carbon dioxide accounting for about 80% of this increase.
Carbon dioxide concentrations in 2021 were 415.7 parts per million (ppm), methane at 1908 parts per billion (ppb) and nitrous oxide at 334.5 ppb. These values constitute, respectively, 149%, 262% and 124% of pre-industrial levels before human activities started disrupting natural equilibrium of these gases in the atmosphere.
Needless to say, the Emissions Gap report from the United Nations Environment Programme describes global efforts to reduce carbon pollution "highly inadequate".
Update (November 4): A study published in PLOS finds an interesting, though implausible, result.
The worldwide phase out of animal agriculture, combined with a global switch to a plant-based diet, would effectively halt the increase of atmospheric greenhouse gases for 30 years and give humanity more time to end its reliance on fossil fuels.
[E]ven in the absence of any other emission reductions, persistent drops in atmospheric methane and nitrous oxide levels, and slower carbon dioxide accumulation, following a phaseout of livestock production would, through the end of the century, have the same cumulative effect on the warming potential of the atmosphere as a 25 gigaton per year reduction in anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions, providing half of the net emission reductions necessary to limit warming to 2°C.
Update (November 6): WMO further reports that the past eight years are the warmest period on record.
The global mean temperature in 2022 is currently estimated to be about 1.15 [1.02 to 1.28] °C above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial average.
Not everybody will agree with these models — or, the cutoffs imposed by the Potsdam Institute researchers. Some experts are more optimistic about technology and humanity’s ability to innovate. Others point out that it is easy to imagine countries failing to achieve what is necessary to stay below 2C at all.
In the end, these are simply well-informed models of how the world will work. What’s more, we still have a limited understanding of how the climate system will respond to emissions.
At the U.N. Climate Change Conference late last month, world leaders reaffirmed the 1.5C goal. But these scenarios show that without dramatic action — action the leaders did not commit to taking — it most likely will not be possible.
