Thursday, March 07, 2013

Big One-Year Jump In Atmospheric CO2 Brings Climate Catastrophe Closer | ThinkProgress

Big One-Year Jump In Atmospheric CO2 Brings Climate Catastrophe Closer | ThinkProgress:

 "There is a limited “budget” of carbon the world can dump into the atmosphere while still maintaining a reasonable chance of staying under the 2 degree limit: 565 gigatons by 2050 to keep our chances at 75 percent, to be precise. At our current trends — and as 2012′s jump can attest — we’re set to burn through that budget in 16 years, rendering our chances of staying under 2 degrees of warming alarmingly thin. Getting back on track will require keeping the overwhelming majority of the fossil fuel available to us in the ground.

Otherwise, we face destructively high sea level rise, water supplies for hundreds of millions of people threatened by climate shifts, global crop declines, bleached coral reefs around the world, a rise in ocean acidification threatening marine ecosystems, and a host of other crises."


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