The Facts About the Changing Climate, Graphed
The world’s bleak climate situation, in 3 charts; We’ve got a long way to go and a short time to get there.
David Roberts, April 30, 2018 (VOX)
“…[Both optimists and pessimists have a case the fight against on climate change. There is a revolution in clean energy – but it’s not happening fast enough. This can be shown in three key graphics adapted from an overview by journalist Jeff Tollefson in the journal Nature]…Global average temperatures have risen about 1.1 degrees Celsius since preindustrial times. At current rates, they could exceed 1.5 degrees by 2030. And global greenhouse gas emissions, after a brief lull from 2014 to 2016, are rising again…The worst-case scenarios, nudging up to 4 or 5 degrees, seem unlikely at this point. The political and economic winds have shifted; the curve is bending…
…As of 2015, renewable energy provided 19.3 percent of final global energy consumption. Excluding traditional biomass (burning wood for heat and cooking), it was 10.2 percent. Without hydro, that was 6.6 percent. Wind, solar, geothermal, and biomass electricity together accounted for 1.6 percent…Renewables are growing faster than any other source of energy, but they’ve got a long, long way to go…
…China’s miraculous spurt of economic growth, fueled almost entirely by coal…[was followed by a] miraculous plateauing of emissions in the last few years, driven by a wide range of efforts to curb coal use…In the US and the EU, emissions have largely decoupled from economic growth, trending mildly down, mostly due to decarbonization in electricity…[But it is in rapidly developing countries like India,] Turkey, Indonesia, and Vietnam where key decisions about 21st-century infrastructure are being made…[H]itting Paris targets will mean both that developed nations start rapidly reducing toward net-zero emissions by mid-century and that developing nations find a different path to prosperity than the one traveled by the countries around them…It is a long shot.” click here for more
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