Upper Limit On Emissions Likely To Be Exceeded Within Decades

An anonymous reader writes "A panel of expert climate scientists appointed by the United Nations has come to a consensus on an upper limit for greenhouse gases. The panel says we will blow past this limit in just a few decades if emissions continue at their current pace. 'To stand the best chance of keeping the planetary warming below an internationally agreed target of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above preindustrial levels and thus avoiding the most dangerous effects of climate change, the panel found, only about 1 trillion tons of carbon can be burned and the resulting gas spewed into the atmosphere. Just over half that amount has already been emitted since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and at current rates of energy consumption, the trillionth ton will be released around 2040, according to calculations by Myles R. Allen, a scientist at the University of Oxford and one of the authors of the new report. More than 3 trillion tons of carbon are still left in the ground as fossil fuels.' You can read a summary of the report's findings online (PDF). It says plainly, 'It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming (PDF) since the mid-20th century.'"

Comments

Re:Um what TF?

[GameboyRMH]

The rate of natural sequestration is so slow that for the purposes of planning within the next century, we can use a fixed amount. Technically you're correct but natural sequestration is hardly fast enough to be relevant to our civilization.

Re:High Certainty.

[IWannaBeAnAC]

That's a load of nonsense - the problem is that 10-15 years is too short a time-scale to make a reliable judgment. Since 1975, global average surface air temperature has increased at a rate of 0.17 deg.C/decade. But it isn't a steady increase. If you look at the 15-year period up to 2006, the warming trend was almost twice as high as normal (namely 0.3 C per decade) but nobody cared much (except climate scientists and environmentalists). The 15-year period from 1998 to now has been slower than the trend, and that's got hugely more attention. The reason is that interest groups strongly push the latter, and want to ignore anything that doesn't fit their agenda. See here for details

Re:so who is doing the polluting?

[Eunuchswear]

12th per capita, pre-ceeded by the economic power-houses of:

Quatar
Trinidad and Tobago
Dutch Antilles
Kuwait
Brunei
United Arab Emirates
Aruba
Bahrain
Luxembourg
Falkland Islands
Austtralia.

Ok, Australia is almost a real place, but the rest of them are jokes.

The EU average is less than half of US emissions per capita.