This week’s issue of Nature looks in detail at “the coming climate crunch”.
As my colleague Quirin Schiermeier explains on the Climate Feedback blog, “What’s it all about then? Well, Gavin Schmidt and David Archer, in their news and views piece, get to the heart of it: “Dangerous climate change, even loosely defined, is going to be hard to avoid.’”
The Real Climate blog focuses on two papers which look at the chances of staying below 2°C warming. “Both find that the most directly relevant quantity is the total amount of CO2 ultimately released, rather than a target atmospheric CO2 concentration or emission rate,” the blogging team writes. “This is an extremely useful result, giving us a clear statement of how our policy goals should be framed.”
Much of the coverage focuses on the suggestion in one of these papers that once humanity has added a trillion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere 2°C is inevitable (eg: Wired).
In the Guardian, Myles Allen, author of one of the papers, writes:
Like all scientists, most of what I do is arcane and technical and of very little interest to outsiders. For once, however, I’m involved in a couple of studies (published today in Nature), that my fellow parents might just find interesting. The headline result of both papers is that the risk of dangerous climate change is primarily determined by the total amount of carbon dioxide that we, the human race, release into the atmosphere over all time, not by emissions in any particular year.
Joseph Romm, of the Climate Progress blog, is unimpressed though. He writes that our issue “fails utterly to provide its readers with the two must-haves in any comprehensive coverage of the issue:
-A clear and specific understanding of the plausible worst-case scenario impacts facing the world post-2050 on our current emissions path.
-A clear and specific understanding of the core climate solutions, policies for their rapid deployment, and an understanding of why the total cost of action is so darn low — one tenth of a penny on the dollar.”
Make up your own mind: all the content is here.