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3. Our remaining carbon budget is tiny
At its core, climate change is really simple to grasp. The more carbon dioxide – and other warming gases – that we put into the atmosphere, the higher global temperatures will rise. Between 1850 and 2019, humans released around 2,390 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. One gigatonne is equivalent to one billion metric tonnes, so that’s a lot of carbon dioxide. So far these emissions have led to 1.07C of warming when compared to pre-industrial levels.
To have a 50/50 chance of staying under 1.5C of warming, we can only release an extra 500 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere – and that includes emissions from the beginning of 2020. In 2019 we emitted over 36 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide, and as emissions are still yet to peak it looks extremely likely that the world will eventually sail past that carbon budget.
The same logic applies to other temperature thresholds, too. To have a 50/50 chance of keeping temperatures below two degrees of warming, we must emit fewer than 1,350 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide.
In May 2016, to make visualizing climate change easier for the general public, University of Reading climate scientist Ed Hawkins created an animated spiral graphic[19] of global temperature change as a function of time, a representation said to have gone viral.[9][20] Jason Samenow wrote in The Washington Post that the spiral graph was “the most compelling global warming visualization ever made”,[21] before it was featured in the opening ceremony of the 2016 Summer Olympics.[10]
— Wikipedia
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