At least since 2013, one of the biggest concerns in the climate change debate has been the so-called carbon budget — a fixed limit to the volume of carbon dioxide emissions that we can put into the atmosphere before irrevocably committing to a considerably hotter planet.
As of 2011, that budget was about 1,000 billion tons of carbon dioxide before the planet is likely to careen past a 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) rise in temperatures, which is above what is believed to be the Earth’s temperature before industrialization. The budget shrinks by about 41 billion tons a year, more recently put at about 600 billion tons (or 15 years of emissions) by a group of scientists and climate policy wonks.
But now, a team of prominent climate scientists say the budget is probably even narrower. The problem is how you define “preindustrial,” or when you consider human-caused perturbations of the atmosphere to have begun. Many analyses have taken the late 19th century as the starting point, but the new study in Nature Climate Change suggests significant human influence was afoot by at least 1750, and may have contributed as much as one-fifth of a degree Celsius of warming (0.36 degrees Fahrenheit) before the late 1800s.
Also a important related article Prior Post on CACOR…
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