Today a study was published in Nature which hopefully will ring the alarm bells loud enough for people to understand what we are up against:

Climate change is an extremely serious threat, and we will loose if we do not act now.

Malte Meinhausen and colleagues have demonstrated for the first time how much CO2 can still be emitted until 2050 if we want to avoid a global warming by more than 2°C.

Their result: the world can emit about 1000 billion (= 1 trillion) tons of CO2 by 2050 if we want to have a 75% chance to stay below 2°C warming. Between 2000 and 2009 the world has already emitted one third of that amount.

The most worrying aspects of this study are:

As Meinhausen points out:” At present rates of emissions, we will use up the remaining two thirds in another 20 years, by around 2030. We will consume this 2000 to 2050 budget even earlier, [mehr...]