What is the carbon budget, and what happens if we don’t reach it? Why is 1.5 degrees warming our target? What does 1.5C mean, is that how much hotter the globe is now compared to 200 years ago? If we reach the carbon budget, does that mean climate change will become 100% irreversible and the earth will heat up until humanity has to move off-planet?
In: Earth Science
Global warming is already irreversible in human lifetime terms. Short of finding a way to remove CO2 and CH4 from the atmosphere, we are already on the path of continuing temperature rise for the foreseeable future. Of course on geological scales, eventually Earth will hit another ice age, but that’s not really relevant for humans alive today. Carbon budget is just a convenient way of saying “how much can you emit, without going over the target”; we sort of realized that US, China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, Russia etc will not reduce their emissions fast enough; and accepted that some optimistic targets are better than no targets. The atmosphere is about 1C warmer now than it was in 1880; enough to decrease arctic ice and snow cover in the north hemisphere, etc etc etc
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