An Update on Carbon Budgets
We’re not doing what we need to be doing
I wrote about carbon budgets awhile back. That post had the distinction of being my least-read and least-clapped-for post. OK, I get it … not the most scintillating topic in the wide world of climate change. But I submit it may be the most important topic, because it describes how scientists track two crucial issues: (1) how much more CO2 and other GHGs can we afford to release into the atmosphere? and (2) how much hotter can we expect the planet to get once our carbon budget is exhausted?
Under the auspices of the IPCC, climate scientists have found that tracking carbon budgets is a good way to capture the relationships between fossil fuel use, CO2 emissions, and global temperatures. With a quantification of those interactions in hand, scientists can predict how hot it is going to get, given how much CO2 is in the atmosphere, which in turn depends on how much additional oil, gas, and coal we will burn before we stop.
The latest update of carbon budgets was completed this year (source). As can be seen in the table below, remaining carbon budgets for avoiding specific average temperature increases (here, 1.5°C, 1.7°C, and 2.0°C) have shrunk considerably between 2020 and 2023, thanks to our continued failure to curb emissions following the slight dip we experienced in 2020…
