Fossil fuel emissions threaten a key climate threshold sooner than previously thought, a report says.
Human fossil fuel emissions are threatening a key climate threshold twice as quickly as previously thought, a new report says.They say record emissions of carbon dioxide over the past three years are a key factor., temperatures for 2023 as a whole are expected to be close to 1.5C above the pre-industrial level, before the world first started heavily using coal, oil and gas around 1850.
The 1.5C figure is a key component of the promises made by political leaders when they signed the Paris climate agreement in 2015. They contribute heavily to air pollution but have an unexpected benefit for the climate because they help cool the atmosphere by reflecting sunlight back into space. The researchers say this new understanding of the role of aerosols removes 100bn tonnes from the remaining 1.5C budget. Combined with the extra carbon and some other small adjustments, this brings the total remaining budget down to 250bn tonnes.
"There are no socio-technical scenarios globally available in the scientific literature that would support that that is actually possible, or even describe how that would be possible," said Prof Joeri Rogelj, also from Imperial College London.
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