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Monday, February 26, 2018

Hoping for the best, expecting the worse

The world will need sweeping changes over the next 20 years ranging from energy use to food production to achieve climate goals set by almost 200 nations, the new heads of a top environmental think-tank said. Both said "revolutions" were needed to tackle climate change, such as capturing greenhouse gas emissions from power plants that burn fossil fuels or by reforming agriculture, where meat production and fertilisers are big sources of greenhouse gases.

"When Germany is not in a position to phase out coal can we expect that Poland or Indonesia or Vietnam or Turkey ... can phase out coal?" Ottmar Edenhofer, new co-director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, explained.

The  new co-director Johan Rockstrom, a Swedish scientist, said governments were far from achieving the core goal in the 2015 Paris Agreement of limiting a rise in global average temperatures to "well below" two degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times. "We have just literally 20 years to either succeed or fail" in the goals of getting the planet on a more sustainable path, Rockstrom said 

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