Author(s)

Michael E. Schlesinger, Douglas A. Becker

Climate Research Group, Department of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA.

With the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States of America, it appears likely that the initiation of mitigation of human-caused Global-Warming/Climate-Change will be delayed many years. Accordingly, here we calculate the Emission Phaseout Duration, D = Y_E - Y_S, where Y_S and Y_E are the Start and End Years of the emissions reduction, for Y_S = 2020, 2025 and 2030, and maximum Global Warming targets, ΔT_max = 2.0°C, 1.9°C, 1.8°C, 1.7°C, 1.6°C and 1.5°C. The 2.0°C and 1.5°C maxima are the “Hard” and “Aspirational” targets of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. We find that D decreases with increasing Y_S from 2020, and with decreasing ΔT_max. In particular, D decreases from: 1) 76 years for Y_S = 2020 to 53 years for Y_S = 2030 for ΔT_max = 2.0°C, and 2) 34 years for Y_S = 2020 to 7 years for Y_S = 2030 for ΔT_max = 1.5°C. Thus, delaying the initiation of the phaseout of greenhouse-gas emissions from 2020 to 2030 makes it more difficult to achieve ΔT_max = 2.0°C and impossible to achieve ΔT_max = 1.5°C.

Climate Change, Fair Plan, Trump, Mitigation

Schlesinger, M. and Becker, D. (2017) Fair Plan 10: Post-Trump Global-Warming Mitigation. Journal of Environmental Protection, 8, 898-913. doi: 10.4236/jep.2017.88056.