A new study found richer countries need to act quickly to stop fossil fuels and avoid the worst consequences of climate change. Time is really running out this time.
The researchers of Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research from the University of Manchester have an "expiry date": 2034. It is the last year to stop all oil and gas production before total climate catastrophe.
The damage is done
Even if the rich countries manage to agree, already now the study concludes what's up the 50% of possibilities to avoid a temperature increase of 1,5 degrees Celsius or more beyond that period of time. The end of fossil fuel extraction in rich countries over the next seven years gives us a chance of 67% to have a decently habitable climate. The report, which hasn't been peer reviewed, comes a year after that an altro relationship (of the International Energy Agency) suggested stopping the exploration of new fossil fuels now.
This is just the latest study that should (but won't) alert world leaders, who have wavered on adopting policies to truly reduce carbon emissions and end the use of fossil fuels. This is especially the fault of the richer nations, who have faltered in global climate negotiations without finding radical solutions.
Remove CO2? Not enough: either via fossil fuels, or disaster.
The study also extinguishes the hope that the removal of carbon dioxide is enough to save us. Nature-based techniques like reforestation and negative emissions technologies take carbon directly out of the air, and they matter. However, none are sufficient enough to replace “deep and rapid reductions in all fossil fuel production,” according to the report.
This is where the authors of the report are harshest and clearest. Cuts in fossil fuels cannot be replaced with CO2 cut policies. There is no scope to open new fossil fuel production facilities (which countries like the US will do instead, given the huge number of oil and gas leases already granted and ready to go).
There were many, many warnings. Emissions continued to increase. Negative emissions technologies, at this point, are still largely speculative. “Their use on a planetary scale,” the researchers write, “is difficult to even imagine.”
Eliminate fossil fuels to avoid total disaster
The authors do not claim that these technologies will have no impact on climate change mitigation. Indeed, we need to study and develop. They reiterate that they are not enough alone, however. Nothing will be enough, except the abatement of gas and oil: we have less than 12 years to do it, and it seems that the world is even going backwards, in the opposite direction.
