The paper was released on the sidelines of the COP 27 climate summit in Egypt. The Paris Agreement goal of limiting global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels will be out of reach in nine years due to the current rate of global emissions.
The paper assesses what scientists call the "carbon budget" which is a way of predicting the amount of warming that will be produced by a given volume of emissions. Just as a personal budget tells you how much more you can spend before you go broke, the calculation tells us how much more we can afford to emit.
If the world produces more CO2 than expected, the odds of limiting warming to 1.5C will fall below 50%. The carbon budget would run out by 2032. A UN report last month found that emissions need to fall 45% by the year 2030. The world is currently at a 1.2C temperature. The crisis will only get worse if every fraction of degree of warming is added. According to a report published this week, liquified natural gas projects could consume up to 10% of the remaining carbon budget on their own.
The math behind both reports is very hard. Global emissions are still rising despite the fact that emissions are lower than they would have been if fossil fuel consumption rates had not gone up. The longer the carbon budget lasts, the sooner emissionspeak. If the budget is used up, the only way to return to more moderate warming is through carbon removal technologies that are expensive and unreliable. The cheapest course of action is to bend the emissions curve.
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