Chapter 38: Meeting the Goals of the Paris Agreement: Temperature Implications of the Shell Sky Scenario

The Paris Agreement (UN, 2015) has established a global target of keeping the increase in the global average surface temperature to “well below” 2°C relative to preindustrial levels, and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature rise to 1.5°C. There are numerous scenarios for greenhouse gas (GHG) emission trajectories that are consistent with the climate stabilization at different levels. Many examples are included as part of the scenario assessment by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2014) that summarizes the results from the scientific literature from different modeling groups. Fossil fuels are a primary source of human-induced GHG emissions and fossil fuel producers recognize the importance of energy-related emissions (Shell, 2013; BP, 2018; ExxonMobil, 2018). To provide an assessment of the temperature implications of the latest Shell scenario called “Sky” (Shell, 2018), we apply the MIT Integrated Global System Modeling (IGSM) framework (Sokolov et al., 2018) that combines a representation of a global economy and the Earth components (land, ocean, atmosphere).