“A major paper released on the sidelines of the COP27 climate summit in Egypt has started a countdown. At the current rate of global emissions, the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels will likely be permanently out of reach in nine years, the study found.  The paper, published on Nov. 11 and written by dozens of leading climatologists, the paper assesses what scientists call the “carbon budget,” which is a way of predicting the amount of warming that will likely be produced by a given volume of emissions. Run in reverse, the calculation tells us how much more we can afford to emit before a certain warming target becomes impossible—just as a personal budget tells you how much more you can spend before you go broke.”

Source: Global Carbon Budget 2022, Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 14, 4811–4900, 2022 https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-14-4811-2022