Will Energy Transition Be Capable to Halt the Global Warming and Why the Climate Change Projections are so Wrong?

— The current state-of-art of studies aimed at forecasting the development of world energy and its influence on the Earth’s atmosphere and climate is analyzed. Advantages of applying a historical-extrapolation approach to forecasting the development of world energy and other anthropogenic sources affecting the planet’s atmosphere and climate, and also comprehensive consideration of natural climatic factors and natural variability features of the global climate are demonstrated. It is shown that a pattern adequately reflecting the change in the world’s energy consumption and its carbon intensity was presented as a result of a genetic (based on the historical development regularities) world energy development forecast elaborated at the Moscow Power Engineering Institute (MPEI) more than 30 years ago. The cumulative carbon dioxide emission estimates for the period of 1990‒2020 obtained using this approach are fully consistent with the actual data following from the world energy statistics 1 . By using this approach, it became possible to predict an essential transformation of the world energy mix (energy transition) at the beginning of the current century, which manifested itself in the growing role of carbon-free energy sources, primarily renewable ones. The predictions carried out in the 1990s using the MPEI’s combined climatic model, which combines the principles of dynamic and statistical modeling of the global climatic system and takes into account the effect of natural climatic factors and the climatic system’s internal features with using a genetic forecast of world energy consumption and carbon dioxide emission for the period of 1990‒2020, showed an encouraging consistency with the data of observed global temperature variation dynamics. The prediction results show that the majority of the most radical energy consumption and corresponding carbon dioxide emission scenarios are in reality unfeasible, and the model predictions of global climatic changes performed according to these scenarios are also extremely unlikely. At the same time, it is stated that, to achieve the goals of preventing the average global temperature increase by more than 2°C in comparison with the preindustrial period, it is necessary, along with decreasing the consumption of fossil fuel, to develop, on significant scales, carbon dioxide capture technologies, both biological (forest recreation, protection from forest fires, etc.) and geological (direct disposal).