The world is increasingly close to the atmospheric limit for carbon dioxide. Failure to drastically and urgently reduce CO2 emissions will very soon make it impossible to avoid an average warming of the Earth at the 2ºC threshold which is considered dangerous to life. Moreover, we have already spent half of a hypothetical budget of 3.7 billion tons of CO2 emissions, the invisible boundary from which the two degrees are inevitable.
These are some of the findings of two studies published by the journal Nature, as well as a clarion call to policy makers before the Copenhagen Climate Summit in December and society as a whole.
One of the studies was by a team led by Malte Meinshausen of Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. The scientists calculated how much CO2 can be allowable to still be produced before reaching these two degrees of Earth’s temperature. The conclusion: the world cannot exceed one billion tons of carbon dioxide emitted from 2000 to 2050. The problem is that the planet has already delivered one third of that amount in the nine years since the beginning of the century. “If we continue to burn fuel this way, in 20 years we have spent our entire budget and reach the inevitable rise of 2ºC,” Meinshausen concludes, after three years of work with British, Canadian, and German scientists.
According to their findings, as noted by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world has to cut more than half the emissions for 2050, in relation to the levels that existed in 1990. If successful, no matter how difficult it would be to carry out the plan, the likelihood of overcoming the fateful two degrees of warming is reduced to 25%. Total elimination of the possibility is not forthcoming at that level of effort.
Meinshausen told the Associated Press that ‘even if the world were to lower its emissions to less than the limit, there is still a 25 percent chance that temperatures would rise above the dangerous level.’
Via Centre for Ecology & Hydrology
