Fossil fuel use must fall twice as fast as thought to contain global warming - study

[IDemo]

Climate scientists have bad news for governments, energy companies, motorists, passengers and citizens everywhere in the world: to contain global warming to the limits agreed by 195 nations in Paris last December, they will have to cut fossil fuel combustion at an even faster rate than anybody had predicted.

Joeri Rogelj, research scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria, and European and Canadian colleagues propose in Nature Climate Change that all previous estimates of the quantities of carbon dioxide that can be released into the atmosphere before the thermometer rises to potentially catastrophic levels are too generous.

Instead of a range of permissible emissions estimates that ranged up to 2,390 bn tons from 2015 onwards, the very most humans could release would be 1,240 bn tons.

In effect, that halves the levels of diesel and petrol available for petrol tanks, coal for power stations, and natural gas for central heating and cooking available to humankind before the global average temperature – already 1C higher than it was at the start of the Industrial Revolution – reaches the notional 2C mark long agreed internationally as being the point of no return for the planet.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/feb/25/fossil-fuel-use-must-fall-twice-fast-thought-contain-global-warming

[daleanime]

1. This is just one of the reasons....

we have to start making changes.

[Gregorian]

3. This is a problem that has not-doing as one of the components to the solution.

It's really the solution to climate change. But we can't stop now. Who is going to have dental work done without anesthesia? We're in a position we can't easily get out of. Having said that, I find it incredible what we have gotten away with. I mean, the CO2 is still in the air from every Model T, not to mention coal factories in London in the 1800's. Granted it's not much, but the amount of activity is impossible to imagine.

Oops, I got carried away.

[daleanime]

5. Huh?

[NickB79]

6. My interpretation: the reason we have a carbon problem is that we do too much stuff as a species

Building cities, creating farmland from prairie, mining ores, sucking billions of barrels of oil out of the ground, shipping plastic sporks 5,000 miles from a factory in China, having millions of new little humans to carry on the cycle, etc.

The ultimate solution to our climate problem is to stop doing all these things. Essentially, to degrow human society, the global economy, and at it's core the human population.

Attempting to find stopgap measures to keep this global Ponzi scheme going a little longer only end up making things worse, and end up making the now-inevitable crash even more devastating.

[daleanime]

7. We have to change, that much is certain....

but hope needs to be the last thing given up. Many of the things that were thought to be inevitable never came to pass.

[GliderGuider]

8. There is another POV that says hope should be the first thing to go.

Because clinging to hope blinds us to our reality.

All the things we thought were impossible but came to pass anyway are the foundation of the predicament. Never say "never" - that's a very long time.

[Gregorian]

2. Good. That ought to accellerate our efforts to change what we're doing.

[pscot]

4. I'm not sre accelerate is the right word here

since what we're "doing" looks more like Brownian motion tan directed effort.