Bending the Curve: Climate Change Solutions, Technologies for Super Pollutant Mitigation

The chapter explore a complementary climate solution to CO2 reductions: reducing a key group of warming agents knows as super pollutants or short-lived climate pollutants (SLCPs) to bend the warming curve quickly (over a few decades) while we pursue CO2 mitigation to bend the curve in the long term (over several decades to centuries). Combined, these efforts, if enacted by 2020, give us a significant chance (about 90% probability) of keeping warming well below 2°C (aiming for 1.5°C) in this century and beyond. Mitigation of SLCPs, if completed by 2030, can bend the warming curve by up to 0.6°C by 2050 (about 0.4°C from methane mitigation, 0.1°C from black carbon, and 0.1°C from HFCs), cutting the rate of projected warming by about half compared with “business as usual” and reducing the projected sea level rise between 2020 and 2050 by 20%.