The Crisis Report — 08 (part two)

I’m going to be blunt. We have already locked in 4C-5C of warming.

The analysis of the ice cores to produce this record of the last 800Ky of the Earth’s climate history is a monumental achievement.

This graph represents 60 years of effort by the global paleontology community.

It’s right there in the charts. We were just too slow to understand it.

No more games, no more history, no more hints. I’m tired and I’m sad.

So let’s cut to the chase. You want to understand what I see when I look at these charts.

Let me ask you one last time. The question we should have asked in 1850, and 1976, and 2000, and 2016. Assuming you start at a CO2 level of 280ppm.

How much additional CO2 will it take to raise the Earth’s temperature by one degree more?

Do you think you know the answer to that question?

Really?

This is not a trivial question. It is the essential question of Climate Change because it defines what your “carbon budget” is going to look like.

Imagine we are in 1850. The atmospheric CO2 level is 280ppm. You want to power an Industrial Revolution by burning coal, oil and gas.