Keeping the world below 2°C of warming needs tech we don’t have
Enlarge / Reforesting would help, but we're still deforesting. (credit: Mikko Muinonen)
The analysis is well known to everyone who has paid even a little attention: the world hasn't yet done enough to lessen the impacts of climate change. The last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report included greenhouse gas emissions scenarios that could limit global warming to two degrees Celsius or less, but we're not even close to a trajectory that would achieve any of them.
But there's something about those two-degrees scenarios you may not know, which climate scientists have been talking a lot about recently. Those scenarios involved a substantial deployment of technologies to actively remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Without those technologies, we're even further from sufficient emissions cuts.
That leaves us with a crucial question: can carbon dioxide removal techniques be scaled up to the necessary level in time? A new European Academies Science Advisory Council (EASAC) report-reviewed and endorsed by the national academies of more than two dozen countries-evaluates the outlook for carbon dioxide removal. And it's not optimistic.
Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments