1.5C global warming threshold to be passed within a decade

The world will burn through its remaining carbon budget in less than ten years unless nations significantly reduce greenhouse gas pollution, a new study has found.

The Global Carbon Budget, a yearly assessment of how much the world can afford to emit to stay within its warming targets, found that greenhouse gas pollution will hit a record high this year, due to a 1% increase in carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels.

To avoid passing critical warming thresholds and triggering catastrophic climate impacts, the planet “can release no more than 380 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent over the coming decades – an amount equal to about nine years of current emissions”, the report warned.

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Holding warming at 1.5C “represents our best chance at avoiding irreversible changes to the Earth’s climate system and protecting vulnerable groups of people and wildlife”, explained Popular Science.

Beyond 1.5C, “extinctions are forecast to rise steeply, coral diversity will shrink by 90% or more”, said Australia’s ABC News. “Extreme weather events – droughts, floods, cyclones, bushfires – will intensify in parts of the world, sea-level rise will accelerate,” it added. As a result “millions more people will be displaced” and “crossing tipping points leading to ecosystem and ice-sheet collapse will become more likely”.

Yet “even as scientists warn of the world’s dangerous trajectory”, leaders at Cop27 have “advocated for natural gas as a ‘transition fuel’ that would ease the world’s switch from fossil energy to renewables”, said The Washington Post.

It added that “this rhetoric has alarmed scientists and activists” who believe that expanding natural gas production could “harm vulnerable communities and push the planet toward a hotter, hellish future”.

Meanwhile, a “glimmer of hope” comes from emissions produced by the destruction of forests, said The Guardian. These have been “declining slowly over the last two decades”, and “when this decline is taken into account, global carbon emissions have been essentially flat since 2015”.