Ainda sobre aquele cientista da Universidade de Oxford, Raymond Pierrehumbert (que se diplomou em Harvard e obteve o doutoramento no MIT) que já anteriormente tinha sido mencionado neste blog, transcrevo abaixo alguns extractos de um importante artigo do mesmo:
"Let’s get this on the table right away, without mincing words. With regard to the climate crisis, yes, it’s time to panic. We are in deep trouble. To understand why, it is necessary to understand something about carbon budgets....The upshot is that the total cumulative carbon allocation for humanity compatible with a 50–50 chance of keeping global warming under 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) is, in round numbers, a trillion tonnes....And of that trillion tonnes, we have already used up over 630 billion tonnes, leaving just 370 billion tonnes to go. That might seem like a lot of tonnes, but at current emissions rate, we’d get there in just 37 years, or 2057....Even in the European Union, which has expressed a strong commitment to decarbonization, emissions were up 1.8 percent in 2017 (Eurostat 2018) and down 2.5 percent in 2018 (Eurostat 2019), resulting in little progress toward decarbonization. Every year that passes, where emissions fail to decrease, puts the goal of staying under a trillion tonnes farther out of reach. With continued 2.5 percent compound growth, we hit our trillion-tonne limit in under 27 years. And if the trend continues beyond that time, the dark magic of exponential growth brings our planet to two trillion tonnes in 50 years (4 degrees Celsius of warming, or 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) and three trillion tonnes (6 degrees Celsius warming, or roughly 10.8 degrees Fahrenheit) just 86 years from now... The impacts are familiar: increased forest fires, drought in some places but deluges in others, loss of Arctic sea ice, increase in deadly heatwaves, increased food insecurity, sea-level rise, and biodiversity loss, among many other impacts...An additional consideration is that there’s a 50–50 chance that the warming is worse than these mid-range forecasts, perhaps much worse. Heat stress could make half the planet uninhabitable for mammals outdoors"
Pierrehumbert,R. (2019) There is no Plan B for dealing with the climate crisis, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 75:5, 215-221
