• About
    • Which Energy Mix is this?
  • Climate News Network Archive
  • Contact
The climate news that makes a difference.
No Result
View All Result
The Energy Mix
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities
SUBSCRIBE
DONATE
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities
SUBSCRIBE
DONATE
No Result
View All Result
The Energy Mix
No Result
View All Result
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities
  FEATURED
Biden Approves $8B Oil Extraction Plan in Ecologically Sensitive Alaska March 14, 2023
U.S. Solar Developers Scramble after Silicon Valley Bank Collapse March 14, 2023
$30.9B Price Tag Makes Trans Mountain Pipeline a ‘Catastrophic Boondoggle’ March 14, 2023
UN Buys Tanker, But Funding Gap Could Scuttle Plan to Salvage Oil from ‘Floating Time Bomb’ March 9, 2023
Biden Cuts Fossil Subsidies, But Oil and Gas Still Lines Up for Billions March 9, 2023
Next
Prev

Full Accounting of Industrial Age Emissions Makes Global Carbon Budget 40% Smaller

July 31, 2017
Reading time: 2 minutes

byrev / Pixabay

byrev / Pixabay

 

The already limited carbon budget available if countries intend to get climate change under control is even narrower than previously thought, according to a new paper in the journal Nature Climate Change that factors in greenhouse gas emissions in the first century of the Industrial Age.

Most climate calculations make the tacit assumption that significant greenhouse gas emissions began sometime after 1860. By then, though, the Industrial Age had actually been hard at work for more than a century. The study by British and American scientists, including Pennsylvania State University’s Michael Mann, analyzed fossil fuel emissions from the time the Industrial Revolution actually got under way around 1750, and 1860, when most emissions inventories begin.

  • Be among the first to read The Energy Mix Weekender
  • A brand new weekly digest containing exclusive and essential climate stories from around the world.
  • The Weekender:The climate news you need.
Subscribe

That calculation leads a global carbon budget—the additional volume of emissions that can still be released to the atmosphere without triggering catastrophic climate change—as much as 40% smaller than previously believed.

That budget was thought to be roughly 1,000 billion tons of carbon dioxide or equivalent as of 2011. With earlier industrial emissions factored in, however, that number falls to about 600 billion tons—roughly 15 years’ worth at current emission rates.

One implication is that the human economy will hit its “safe” limit for carbon emissions 15 years sooner than previously anticipated. The prognosis is also grim for the Paris climate agreement’s long-term target of containing warming to 1.5ºC above pre-industrial averages. The new calculation, said Mann, “sort of takes 1.5ºC off the table in the absence of active carbon removal.”

For that matter, Mann added, “this study does indicate that it may be more of an uphill battle than we previously thought in order to stabilize warming below the commonly-defined dangerous limit of 2ºC.”

That limit is open to question, too, noted Reto Knutti, a climate expert with Swiss technical university ETH Zurich. “There is no magic, hard threshold that separates ‘safe’ from ‘dangerous,’” he told the Post, noting that that degree of warming might be tolerable for some countries but catastrophic for others.

Adjusting the start date of emission inventories, Knutti points out, “is just as much a political problem: If countries at some point are made responsible not just for their current but also for their past emissions, then it matters when we start the historical blame game.”

Mann, often a lightning rod for climate deniers, published other research earlier this year supporting findings that climate change is altering the northern hemispheric jet stream, allowing weather patterns like droughts, heat waves, and heavy rain to stall in place for longer.



in Carbon Levels & Measurement, COP Conferences, International, Oil & Gas

The latest climate news and analysis, direct to your inbox

Subscribe

Related Posts

U.S. Bureau of Land Management/flickr
Oil & Gas

Biden Approves $8B Oil Extraction Plan in Ecologically Sensitive Alaska

March 14, 2023
114
EcoAnalytics
Media, Messaging, & Public Opinion

Canadians Want Strong Emissions Cap Regulations, Not More Missed Targets

March 14, 2023
123
United Nations
Air & Marine

UN Buys Tanker, But Funding Gap Could Scuttle Plan to Salvage Oil from ‘Floating Time Bomb’

March 10, 2023
94

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

I agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy.

Trending Stories

David Dodge, Green Energy Futures/flickr

U.S. Solar Developers Scramble after Silicon Valley Bank Collapse

March 14, 2023
312
Environmental Defence Canada/flickr

Repsol Abandons Plan to Ship Canadian LNG to Europe

March 17, 2023
169
Rebecca Bollwitt/flickr

Fossils Stay ‘Oily’, Gibsons Sues Big Oil, U.S. Clean Energy Booms, EU Pushes Fossil Phaseout, and Fukushima Disaster was ‘No Accident’

March 14, 2023
174
U.S. National Transportation Safety Board/flickr

$30.9B Price Tag Makes Trans Mountain Pipeline a ‘Catastrophic Boondoggle’

March 14, 2023
234
Behrat/Wikimedia Commons

Hawaii Firm Turns Home Water Heaters into Grid Batteries

March 14, 2023
438
U.S. Bureau of Land Management/flickr

Biden Approves $8B Oil Extraction Plan in Ecologically Sensitive Alaska

March 14, 2023
114

Recent Posts

EcoAnalytics

Canadians Want Strong Emissions Cap Regulations, Not More Missed Targets

March 14, 2023
123
Raysonho/wikimedia commons

Purolator Pledges $1B to Electrify Last-Mile Delivery

March 14, 2023
78
United Nations

UN Buys Tanker, But Funding Gap Could Scuttle Plan to Salvage Oil from ‘Floating Time Bomb’

March 10, 2023
94
Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons

Biden Cuts Fossil Subsidies, But Oil and Gas Still Lines Up for Billions

March 10, 2023
185
jasonwoodhead23/flickr

First Nation Scorches Imperial Oil, Alberta Regulator Over Toxic Leak

March 8, 2023
374
MarcusObal/wikimedia commons

No Climate Risk Targets for Banks, New Guides for Green Finance as 2 Federal Agencies Issue New Rules

March 8, 2023
245
Next Post
Pembina Institute

Ontario Environment Minister Murray Quits Politics, Joins Pembina as Executive Director

The Energy Mix - The climate news you need

Copyright 2023 © Energy Mix Productions Inc. All rights reserved.

  • About
  • Contact
  • Privacy Policy and Copyright
  • Cookie Policy

Proudly partnering with…

scf_withtagline
No Result
View All Result
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities

Copyright 2022 © Smarter Shift Inc. and Energy Mix Productions Inc. All rights reserved.

Manage Cookie Consent
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behaviour or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
Manage options Manage services Manage vendors Read more about these purposes
View preferences
{title} {title} {title}