[Intro]
Last week we talked about how the world's population is set to grow to as many as 12
billion people by the year 2100.
Well, there's something else growing, too: the amount of carbon dioxide we're spewing
into the atmosphere.
According to a series of studies released this week, by the end of this year, we'll
have more carbon dioxide in our atmosphere than ever before, since the advent of humanity.
What's more, these growing emissions are quickly pushing us toward a tipping point in our efforts
to mitigate climate change.
The studies are part of the Global Carbon Budget, a huge project undertaken by a team
of more than 50 researchers from nearly every industrialized country.
Their analysis shows that fossil fuel emissions, which are released by burning coal, oil, and
natural gas, are projected to rise 2.5% this year over last year.
That will push carbon dioxide emissions to a record high of 40 billion metric tons released
this year alone.
The research found that the usual suspects are mostly responsible for the emissions growth,
namely big developed nations including the United States, the European Union, China and
India.
China's emissions, for the first time ever, were more than the United States's and the
European Union's output combined.
This is not an easy thing to figure out -- the global emissions of carbon dioxide!
Carbon Budget scientists discovered all this by using climate models and lots of data from
all around the world, measuring things like how fast fossil fuel emissions are being released
and where, and how levels of our atmospheric carbon dioxide are changing.
They use this data to track how much carbon dioxide is added to the atmosphere every year
and how much more the atmosphere can handle.
The benchmark they have their eyes on is when the planet's average surface temperature becomes
two degrees Celsius warmer than it was before the Industrial Age.
That marker is the internationally agreed-upon threshold at which climate change is thought
to become a full-on threat, with ecosystems and agriculture becoming significantly disrupted.
Disrupting agriculture is not a thing we want.
According to the Budget, future CO2 emissions cannot exceed twelve hundred billion metric
tons before Earth passes that threshold and enters the climate danger zone.
But if the world keeps emitting carbon dioxide at the same rate that it is now, researchers
say that will bust that budget in just thirty years.
So...that's the news.
But what can we do at this point?
Is our goose just cooked?
Well, in order to not pass the two-degree safety threshold, researchers say that we
have two main options.
One is to leave more than half of the Earth's fossil fuel reserves untapped.
Just keep it in the ground.
The other is to develop large-scale techniques for carbon dioxide removal.
These can include relatively simple and intuitive things, like planting more forests, since
plants absorb and hold on to carbon dioxide, or it could involve more complex solutions
like building devices that essentially capture CO2 from smokestacks or just from the atmosphere
and store it underground in a process known as carbon sequestration.
The Carbon Budget researchers say that there are a lot of hurdles to implementing these
kind of things, including high costs, untested technology, and the kind of social barriers
that come along with big, new energy movements.
But we were smart enough to create the technologies that got us into this mess.
With the same brain power and some leadership, we might be able to think our way out of it.
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