he past year has seen an unending drumbeat of climate-driven disasters. And yet, the climate story of this past decade has been one of slow but steady progress. Global CO2 emissions have flattened, and countries representing 88% of global emissions have adopted or announced plans to get to net zero in the latter half of the 21st century.
But this doesn’t mean we can rest on our laurels. Far from it. We are still nowhere near where we need to be to meet our climate goals. In the most recent, which I contributed to, we found that if we want to limit warming to 1.5C we can only emit 420bn more tons of CO2 – equal to around 10 years of current emissions. This means that even with the progress we’ve made, the increase in global temperatures is very likely to exceed 1.5C by the early 2030s.
warming. And climate models show that if we remove more CO2 from the atmosphere than we are emitting it will actually cool the world back down. Removing CO2 from the atmosphere and oceans was highlighted in the recent IPCC report as an “essential element” of meeting our climate goals. Virtually all climate models suggest that we need to remove 6bn tons of CO2 per year by 2050rapid emissions reductions to bring temperatures back down to 1.5C by the end of the century.
We have a saying in the climate science world – that CO2 is forever. It will take close to half a million years before a ton of CO2 emitted today from burning fossil fuels is completely removed from the atmosphere naturally.
Nature’s cycles can’t be changed. What humans must do is to not act & do in ways that affects nature’s cycles adversely.
The solution to climate change is climate change.
Better odds at shifting the earth's axis tilt.