• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

RealClimate

Climate science from climate scientists...

  • Home
  • Start here
  • Contributors
  • Archives
You are here: Home / Archives for budget

budget

How much CO2 your country can still emit, in three simple steps

6 Aug 2019 by Stefan

Everyone is talking about emissions budgets – what are they and what do they mean for your country?

Our CO2 emissions are causing global heating. If we want to stop global warming at a given temperature level, we can emit only a limited amount of CO2. That’s our emissions budget. I explained it here at RealClimate a couple of years ago:

First of all – what the heck is an “emissions budget” for CO2? Behind this concept is the fact that the amount of global warming that is reached before temperatures stabilise depends (to good approximation) on the cumulative emissions of CO2, i.e. the grand total that humanity has emitted. That is because any additional amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will remain there for a very long time (to the extent that our emissions this century will like prevent the next Ice Age due to begin 50 000 years from now). That is quite different from many atmospheric pollutants that we are used to, for example smog. When you put filters on dirty power stations, the smog will disappear. When you do this ten years later, you just have to stand the smog for a further ten years before it goes away. Not so with CO2 and global warming. If you keep emitting CO2 for another ten years, CO2 levels in the atmosphere will increase further for another ten years, and then stay higher for centuries to come. Limiting global warming to a given level (like 1.5 °C) will require more and more rapid (and thus costly) emissions reductions with every year of delay, and simply become unattainable at some point.

In her recent speech at the French National Assembly, Greta Thunberg rightly made the emissions budget her central issue.

So let’s look at how the emissions budget concept can be used to guide policy on future emissions trajectories for countries.

[Read more…] about How much CO2 your country can still emit, in three simple steps

Filed Under: Climate Science Tagged With: budget, co2, emissions

Primary Sidebar

Email Notification

get new posts sent to you automatically (free)
Loading

Recent Posts

  • 2022 updates to the temperature records
  • Unforced variations: Jan 2023
  • The water south of Greenland has been cooling, so what causes that?
  • Unforced variations: Dec 2022
  • Serious mistakes found in recent paper by Connolly et al.
  • Unforced variations: Nov 2022

Our Books

Book covers
This list of books since 2005 (in reverse chronological order) that we have been involved in, accompanied by the publisher’s official description, and some comments of independent reviewers of the work.
All Books >>

Recent Comments

  • Carbomontanus on The water south of Greenland has been cooling, so what causes that?
  • Don Williams on 2022 updates to the temperature records
  • Carbomontanus on The water south of Greenland has been cooling, so what causes that?
  • John Pollack on 2022 updates to the temperature records
  • JCM on 2022 updates to the temperature records
  • Ray Ladbury on 2022 updates to the temperature records
  • Carbomontanus on Unforced variations: Jan 2023
  • Carbomontanus on 2022 updates to the temperature records
  • Victor on 2022 updates to the temperature records
  • Victor on 2022 updates to the temperature records
  • macias shurly on 2022 updates to the temperature records
  • Victor on 2022 updates to the temperature records

Footer

ABOUT

  • About
  • Translations
  • Privacy Policy
  • Contact Page
  • Login

DATA

  • Data Sources
  • Climate model projections compared to observations

INDEX

  • Acronym index
  • Index

Realclimate Stats

1,290 posts

8 pages

229,489 comments

Copyright © 2023 · RealClimate is a commentary site on climate science by working climate scientists for the interested public and journalists.