The main polluting countries on the planet will cause extreme heat

Greenhouse gas emissions from the five most polluting emitters on the planet – China, the United States, the European Union (EU), India and Russia – will foreseeably increase the probability of reaching years of extreme heat by 2030, according to a study released in Nature.

Under current climate change commitments, emissions from these regions could double the number of countries that will experience extremely hot years, relative to other scenarios with no emissions from these top five polluters.

The Nature article indicates that the update of the commitments towards the mitigation of climate change was presented before the Cop26 held in Glasgow (Scotland) last November.

However, those commitments lagged far behind the targets set in the Paris Agreement in 2015 to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees compared to pre-industrial levels.

Expert Lea Beusch and a group of colleagues translated the historical emissions data, combined with the pre-Cop26 commitments of those top five emitters, into a projected warming at the country level by 2030.

They found that taking current climate commitments into account, 92% of the 165 countries studied will predictably experience extremely hot years, which typically only occur about once every century in a pre-industrial climate.

If emissions of these five pollutants are excluded from the equation, the number of countries that could be affected drops to 46%.

The latest estimates have been made based on a scenario that excludes emissions from those five locations after 1991, the time when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) first reported human-caused climate effects.

The results underscore the importance of emissions reduction ambitions for the top five pollutants in order to lessen the effects of climate change over the next decade.