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Copenhagen conference: Call it a wrap

oheffernan — 2009-11-06T17:53:08+00:00

Jeff Tollefson; cross-posted from In the Field

Things are winding down here in Barcelona. The latest negotiating text is out, and everybody is waiting for the final plenary session.

Negotiators seem to have coalesced on what needs to come out of Copenhagen, as opposed to what many would like to see. The basic idea, covered in a bit more detail in my last post, is that leaders could sign an agreement providing decisions on the big issues, including emissions targets, financing, technology, adaptation and deforestation, and then come back early next year to get the details for a formal treaty in place. That might not sound like much, but it eliminates the sense of doubt that was clouding the talks earlier in the week.

There's a bit of confusion in some places, particularly among greens and representatives from developing countries, about what that means, but most see it as a viable solution given that securing a complete, ratifiable treaty might not be possible. Indeed, despite what might be called an air of cautious optimism, the gap between rich and poor countries remains substantial and apparently unbridgeable.

This stark truth was on full display as the G77 group representing developing countries, the European Union and then the United States held back-to-back press conferences giving their assessment of where we stand. I'll take a closer look at the implications of all this in next week's issue, but here's a quick summary: The G77 said it won't support any agreement unless rich countries cut their emissions by at least 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020; the EU said its offer to go up to 30 percent is already aggressive; and the US said its unofficial numbers, which appear in legislative proposals that would reduce emissions to just a few percent below 1990 levels, are both unlikely to change and in line with the science.

I say "apparently" because these are negotiations, and there is a sense that everybody wants a deal. I briefly cornered Alf Wills, a G77 leader from South Africa, to talk about the issue, and he acknowledged that developed countries could always try to bridge the divide with offers of things like money and technology. "That's part of the negotiation," he told me.

Countdown to Copenhagen

oheffernan — 2009-11-06T15:18:10+00:00

Keith Kloor

All hope for Copenhagen seems lost. According to The Times:

“A world treaty on climate change will be delayed by up to a year and is likely to be watered down because countries with the highest greenhouse gas emissions are refusing to commit to legally binding reductions.”

So if Copenhagen becomes just another rallying point for worldwide action, then where to after that? According to The Guardian:

“Sources said a meeting in Mexico in December 2010 would be more likely to see the legal treaty sealed.”

Whatever new roadmap emerges from Copenhagen, religious leaders meeting this week at Windsor Castle in Britain have pledged to galvanize their constituents to take action on global warming. Andrew Revkin at Dot Earth notes the “remarkable conclave”.

On the energy front, natural gas continues to be heralded for its various environmental attributes. Recent discoveries of abundant shale gas reserves in the United States, argue Daniel Yergin and Robert Ineson in The Wall Street Journal, transform the debate over generating electricity. They write:

"The US electric power industry faces very big questions about fuel choice and what kind of new generating capacity to build. In the face of new climate regulations, the increased availability of gas will likely lead to more natural gas consumption in electric power because of gas's relatively lower CO2 emissions. Natural gas power plants can also be built more quickly than coal-fired plants."

A broader case was spelled out several months ago by a leading Washington DC think thank, which asserted that natural gas:

"creates an unprecedented opportunity to use gas as a bridge fuel to a 21st-century energy economy that relies on efficiency, renewable sources and low-carbon fossil fuels such as natural gas".

Now, it seems that it has a potential peace dividend as well. Building natural gas pipelines in Central Asia, instead of military transport lines, could bring greater stability to countries such as India and Pakistan, according to this article by Saleem H. Ali and Parag Khanna, in Foreign Policy. There are obvious ancillary benefits for the global climate, since natural gas "is likely to be the cleanest and most cost-effective fuel to meet Pakistan and India’s energy shortfall". The authors add:

"Natural gas development offers a unique opportunity to tackle strategic, diplomatic and environmental goals at the same time.”

Barcelona climate: Momentum builds for a "political agreement" in Copenhagen

oheffernan — 2009-11-05T23:58:04+00:00

Jeff Tollefson; cross-posted from In the Field

The European Commission's chief negotiator, Artur Runge-Metzger, acknowledged this afternoon that Europe might have to settle for a political agreement rather than a binding legal treaty in Copenhagen (see my post this morning for a quick discussion of the issue). Everybody else has been talking about this possibility for some time, but it's not insignificant when the EU, which has always been the primary driver of this process, starts talking about it. Indeed, one environmentalist told me that once Europe gives up on the idea of a fully ratifiable deal in Copenhagen, the game is over.

As noted by The Associated Press, the official European position on the need for a ratifiable treaty remains in place. When I asked a spokesman about some kind of plan "PlanContentRecord B", he squirmed and said this represents more of an acknowledgement of what other people are saying than anything else. In fact, people in the United States started saying this last year, shortly after US President Barack Obama's election, citing the monumental difficulty of establishing a new climate policy in less than a year. Interestingly enough, I talked to one former negotiator who said that many Europeans have been thinking along these lines for just as long but simply chose to maintain pressure by pushing for a full deal.

As it happens, UN climate chief Yvo de Boer and Malta's Michael Zammit Cutajar, who chairs the non-Kyoto negotiations that include the United States, both outlined their vision of a political deal in Copenhagen in a closed-door session with non-governmental groups on Wednesday. For a summary of their positions, check a blog posted by Elliot Diringer at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, a group that drew criticism from ncomprehensive one other than Yvo de Boer himself for making the very same assessment last year.

The problem, once again, is that the United States is not ready to commit because it doesn't have, and isn't likely to have before early next year, domestic climate legislation in place. The US and the EU discussed the issue at a climate summit this week in Washington but were unable to reach any agreement on how to move forward.

Barcelona climate: New analysis shows progress in emerging economies

oheffernan — 2009-11-05T23:50:04+00:00

Jeff Tollefson; cross-posted from In the Field

And now I'll take a look at the major developing countries, as promised both yesterday and today. A new analysis of climate commitments by the six biggest emerging economies - Brazil, China, India, South Africa, Mexico and South Korea - suggests that their cumulative emissions add up to a 25 percent reduction compared to "business as usual" projections for 2020. The report (not yet available on the web but discussed in a session on Tuesday) was commissioned by the German government and this portion was led by Niklas Hohne of the consultancy Ecofys in Koln. For some background, see our earlier coverage here.

Hohne said these six countries make up roughly two-thirds of the developing world emissions, which are more than half of the global total; include everybody and you get a 16 percent reduction in cumulative emissions from the developing world. That is in fact within the 15-30 percent reduction range that has been extracted from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's most recent assessment and made into official EU policy.

This is without word of new commitments expected from Brazil, which ended up delaying its announcement of a new, potentially more comprehensive emissions commitment this week (see our story this week here). President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva held a cabinet meeting to discuss the issue on Tuesday, but the government was unable to settle on a proposal and ended up scheduling another meeting for 14 November.

Barcelona climate: Monitoring the (same old) debate

oheffernan — 2009-11-05T18:18:36+00:00

I’m sitting in the plenary session of the Kyoto Protocol, listening to an old debate over the baseline year used to assess emissions. The protocol is currently tied to 1990 emissions, but Japan, Australia and Canada have all suggested that expressing emissions reductions according to multiple baselines might be useful.

The logic is that although the Kyoto Protocol is tied to 1990, many countries – including the United States - are now pegging their climate proposals to more recent years. That has the advantage of providing a picture of what each country plans to do moving forward. The US and European proposals, for instance, actually look similar using a 2005 baseline (for more on that, see our earlier coverage here). On the other hand, many – including Europeans – have long argued that using new baselines would dilute the protocol and potentially let countries like off the hook (in addition to the United States, think Canada, which has acknowledged it cannot meet its Kyoto targets).

Today, like so many other days, the parties were unable to resolve the matter. Japan’s proposal to illustrate the commitments in tabular form drew initial objections, particularly from China, which said any effort to shift away from the legally binding 1990 baseline would be "totally not acceptable." But those backing the proposal's supporters said there should be a way to ensure that the 1990 baseline remains while noting additional baselines. The idea of using “footnotes” came up.

Discussions about the relative merits of footnotes versus charts seem a bit silly, to be sure, but the issue has been a sticking point for a long time. Some kind of resolution will be necessary in whatever emerges from Copenhagen.

The discussion eventually hit the big issue of emissions targets. The Alliance of Small Island States, which fears the dual impacts of acidification and rising sea levels, led the way by adding up all of the developed country targets (including legislation being debated in the United States) for a grand total of 12-19 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. That compares to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's analysis indicating that a 25-40 percent reduction might be necessary by 2020. And AOSIS is actually pushing for 45 percent cut, to increase the likelihood of keeping temperature increase below 1.5 degrees instead of the generally accepted 2-degree target.

As expected, no headway was made on this issue either, but it does lead into my next posting.

Madagascar: how to save a forest

oheffernan — 2009-11-05T13:27:03+00:00

Anjali Nayar, an International Development Research Centre fellow at Nature, recently visited a pioneering project in Madagascar that's aiming to protect one of the country's few remaining forests. About 90% of the species in Madagascar's rainforests are found nowhere else on Earth, but efforts to save the island nation's forests are about more than conserving biodiversity.

It's hoped that projects like this will provide a model for efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation. Under a proposal, known as reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD), wealthy nations could meet their emissions targets in part by buying carbon credits from developing countries such as Madagascar. REDD is one of the topics up for discussion at the UN climate-change conference in Copenhagen this December. Countries will negotiate whether REDD should be included in the global climate deal that takes over from the Kyoto Protocol.

But as Anjali reports, to be successful these projects must overcome the poverty and political upheaval common to most developing countries. Read Anjali's full report here. Or see a slideshow video version, here.

Barcelona climate: Big heads of state

oheffernan — 2009-11-05T13:06:54+00:00

Jeff Tollefson; cross-posted from In the Field

I arrived at the conference this morning only to encounter global leaders with unusually large heads pulling funny money out of one box labelled "aid" and putting it into another labelled "climate change." It was a short stunt by Oxfam - and just one of many put on by various activist groups each day - intended to raise awareness of the danger that rich countries will simply reduce development aid as they increase funding for adaptation and mitigation. Developing countries have made this a central part of their platform going into Copenhagen - any climate financing must be in addition to existing development aid.

Things are rolling along at the conference. Two days left, and nobody is panicking yet. I haven't heard of any all-night meetings, although short days at these conferences tend to start with business meetings at breakfast and run straight through late dinner meetings, which basically translates into 12-14 hour days. It's easy to say that they aren't getting enough done, but one certainly cannot claim that they aren't spending a lot of time on the effort.

So I just bumped into Ned Helme, who heads the Center for Clean Air Policy in Washington, and he seemed newly optimistic about the way things are going. He says things appear to be headed toward a political agreement in Copenhagen, which would then be followed up with a binding legal agreement next year. And although he was initially sceptical, the idea has grown on him after talking to the negotiating teams in here in Barcelona. A broad agreement on the core principles from on high would free up the technical negotiators to work out the details that are currently bogging things down, Helme says, namely the ongoing architectural dispute over what to do with the Kyoto Protocol (see the first post below).

One of the other ideas floating around is to just pause the negotiations without producing an agreement and then hold another meeting in the first half of next year, but many here say there will be too much pressure on politicians for them to leave Copenhagen without producing anything. A political statement that spells out the basic commitments on financing, REDD and perhaps even emissions targets - likely requiring a range to allow some flexibility for the United States, which is unlikely to have worked out its domestic policy - would allow everybody to claim success while leaving the details for later. That's one theory, anyway.

Now it's time for lunch. It's a good time to try and catch delegations between meetings. More later, including an update on Brazil and developing country commitments promised yesterday.

Barcelona climate: safeguarding primary forests under REDD

oheffernan — 2009-11-04T23:58:29+00:00

Jeff Tollefson; cross-posted from In the Field

And now back to the case of the missing 10-word phrase, which says that any payments for reduced deforestation should include "safeguards against the conversion of natural forests to forest plantations." Just for amusement, here's the gist in UN climate speak: It was in "Non-paper No. 11" but was left out of "Non-paper No.18" when negotiators gathered for a final session before departing Bangkok last month.

"Non-papers" are basically papers with new negotiating text, compiled by facilitators, that are periodically released in order to assess progress and move things forward. Apparently the logic when the practice began was that nobody wanted to give too much weight to unapproved language. At any rate, when this particular section was winnowed down, the phrase was lost.

For the Ecosystems Climate Alliance, a coalition of interest groups that is tracking the REDD debate, this safeguard is critical to ensure that payments for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) do what they are intended to do, which is protect forests. Because plantations can also meet the legal definition of a forest (a separate issue that many are pushing to change), they say countries could get paid to clear native forests and replace them with plantations, which actually increases emissions.

I discussed the issue with a REDD expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists, Doug Boucher, after the Bangkok meeting, and his assessment was that the massive spike in emissions from clearing forests would be enough to prevent such activities. And indeed, it's hard to believe such a practice would be allowed, or that companies or countries would want to invest in it even if it were.

But it also depends on what, exactly, is being measured: overall emissions or forest cover. Non-paper 18 has three options for tracking deforestation, including one that is based on forest cover alone. If that language moved forward, based on the current definition of "forest," the loophole would remain, says Peg Putt, who works on forest and climate issues for The Wilderness Society, itself a member of the alliance.

In the end, the Europeans took the blame for removing the forest-conversion safeguard but claimed it was an accident. The European Commission's chief negotiator, Artur Runge-Metzger, says they have since proposed something to plug the gap, and environmentalists expect to see the new language when the next non-paper is released tomorrow morning.

"There is agreement from all but one party," Putt told me. "I've heard it may be the United States, but that might be pure speculation."

Such speculation is unfortunately common here, due to the fact that the formal talks generally take place behind closed doors. Perhaps we'll find out more tomorrow morning.

Barcelona climate: Nature Geo stirs things up with deforestation analysis

oheffernan — 2009-11-04T23:57:23+00:00

Jeff Tollefson; cross-posted from In the Field

This afternoon has been all about deforestation. Environmentalists are busy tracking the debate about an 10-word phrase - mysteriously deleted at the last talks in Bangkok - that is designed to prevent natural forests from being converted into plantations. But I'll deal with that issue in my next post and move on to a Nature Geoscience commentary that has caused quite a buzz here in Barcelona by downgrading the relative contribution of carbon emissions from deforestation.

The commentary by Guido van der Werf and colleagues (reported by the Guardian here) suggests that emissions from deforestation and degradation are closer to 12 percent of global carbon emissions, rather than the oft-stated 20 percent.

It's an important finding, although not entirely surprising. Folks at the World Resources Institute in Washington have been looking into the issue as well, and their numbers seem to point in the same direction. Indeed, their assessment of 2005 greenhouse gas emissions, illustrated in a flowchart here, shows deforestation making up just 11.3 percent of the global greenhouse gas emissions; separate out carbon dioxide, and the contribution of deforestation comes out below 15 percent.

I recently chatted about the issue with WRI's Tim Herzog, who works on greenhouse gas inventories, and he said the problem is that the numbers are still a bit squishy. WRI's initial analysis converged on 15 percent, with the high end of the range coming in around 20. The report in Nature Geoscience also shows a sizeable uncertainty, ranging from 6-17 percent. It will be interesting to see how these numbers hold up.

Questions quickly arose about whether these new numbers would undermine efforts to include forest carbon in a future climate treaty, but it's not at all clear why or how better information would stall the debate. Forests are being chopped down, releasing carbon into the atmosphere, and stopping this practice remains a relatively cheap and possibly fast way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The only question is how much of the problem we would be solving were we to accomplish that goal.

The van der werf commentary also assesses emissions from peatland fires and degradation in southeast Asia. Including peatland emissions brings the total to 15 percent of global emissions, according to their analysis. As it happens, the conservation group Wetlands International released a new report in Barcelona looking at global peatland emissions. They said their analysis on Southeast Asia is similar to that in the Nature Geoscience, but adding in the rest of the world doubles the impact. Surprisingly, the results suggest that the European Union has the second-highest peatlands emissions, behind only Indonesia.

Barcelona climate: Afternoon updates from the Africans, EU

oheffernan — 2009-11-04T23:51:41+00:00

Jeff Tollefson; cross-posted from In the Field

Following up on yesterday's agreement, the leader of the African Group said during an afternoon press conference he is "guardedly optimistic" about the talks going forward.

But Sudan's Lumumba Di-Aping refused to give any ground on developing countries' demands that rich countries curb emissions by 40 percent by 2020. Current proposals aren't even close to that number, and most political leaders in the United States and Europe consider that goal unattainable. Asked about a compromise and assessments that achieving a 40 percent reduction could be a "heavy lift," Lumumba cited the massive financial investments that followed the economic crisis in suggesting that developed countries are simply lacking the will to act aggressively in response to the climate crisis.

"It cannot be heavy lifting, unless you say that some people are more equal than others," Lumumba said. "We cannot accept total destruction as a choice for developing countries in order to simply appease some political leaders in the West."

Speaking at a press conference an hour later, European officials fell back on the EU position of unilaterally cutting emissions by 20 percent by 2020 and 30 percent if there is a global agreement. Sweden's chief negotiator, Anders Turesson, said those commitments are in line with the science and urged developing countries to put pressure on other rich countries that have not yet announced positions (read: United States) and others whose current offers are "insufficient."

The talks are now "on track, moving forward," said Artur Runge-Metzger, chief negotiator for the European Union. "But of course we'll have to see during the coming days what kind of resonance we get from the African Group" and other developing countries.

More to come soon on the state of REDD talks ( reducing deforestation and forest degradation) and Brazil's climate change discussions.

Barcelona climate: A rough start, tinged with hope

oheffernan — 2009-11-04T10:24:12+00:00

Jeff Tollefson; cross-posted from In the Field

I arrived at the United Nations climate conference today - late, on the second day, after a red-eye flight over the Atlantic and an all-too-brief nap at the hotel – and encountered drama much sooner than expected. I registered, oriented myself at the conference centre, gathered the requisite daily briefing documents and then found a bathroom to deploy a newly purchased toothbrush. It was there, after bumping into a colleague, that I learned the African Group had announced at the opening session on Monday that it would boycott the Kyoto Protocol talks until developed countries get serious about their climate commitments.

The Associated Press covered the story, and our coverage of the last climate meeting in Bangkok has additional background. But the important thing to understand here is that the talks are split into two main tracks. One is designed to extend the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, and the other is under the original 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change. The main difference is that the United States is party to the latter but not the former. Developing countries have taken the stance that the Kyoto Protocol should retain its central role going forward – particularly as there is as yet no alternative - but Europe is seeking a new agreement under the convention.

After brushing my teeth, I met with a representative of the conservation group WWF, Keya Chatterjee, who proceeded to fill me in. What followed the African protest was a full day of informal talks intended to restart negotiations (Chatterjee called them “trust-building sessions”). We then proceeded to a plenary session where a new agreement was announced. Henceforth, negotiators under the Kyoto track would dedicate at least 60 percent of their time talking about emissions targets for industrialized nations; the rest of the time would be used to talk about offsets and land-use and forestry issues that affect the emissions calculations.

So. Here we are at the end of day two, with three days of formal negotiations before the big climate summit in Copenhagen this December, and we have an agreement on how to structure negotiations on one of two tracks. Not exactly promising, but it’s clear that the African countries – largely supported by the G77 representing most developing countries – have made their point. Now we’re back to core issues, such as who does what, how to ensure that it gets done, where the money comes from and how to bundle everything into a single package.

The thought of ironing out all of this by December is daunting, and conventional wisdom posits that it’s now virtually impossible. As a result many are starting to think about minimum requirements for success in Copenhagen, which is perhaps as it should be. But for perspective, it took WWF about a week to piece together a sample treaty (based on language already on the negotiating table) that would resolve the architecture issue by allowing the Kyoto Protocol to continue while including the United States and additional commitments by developing nations in a separate agreement.

The copy Chatterjee gave me is 37 pages; just fill in the numbers. Point being that there is plenty of room for compromise, Chatterjee says. From this perspective, what is missing is trust and political will, but she says one shouldn’t forget about a third factor: shame. Indeed, the idea of shame leads her to a remarkably optimistic conclusion: countries will manage to fill in the numbers in Copenhagen, simply because nobody wants to be responsible for blocking a deal. “There’s not a single country in the world that wants to take the blame for failure in Copenhagen,” she says.

There’s been no shortage of challenges to this view, but it’s worth noting that not everybody has given up on Copenhagen here in Barcelona.

Gore interview with Couric

oheffernan — 2009-11-03T14:26:15+00:00

Stephanie Baudains

Al Gore was yesterday questioned on climate change policy by Katie Couric, anchor and managing editor of CBS Evening News, in an interview that coincided with the release of his latest book Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis' . In a polished delivery the erstwhile American Vice-President said that humanity is in possession of enough tools “to solve three or four climate crises” - if we could only pull together to use them.

Though he praised climate-focussed leaders like President Obama, Gore said that success in solving the climate problem will only be possible when the green movement is truly adopted by the people. The situation calls for a ‘grassroots’ movement, he argued, as for American Civil Rights, with action coming from the bottom up.

The clip below shows Gore responding to critics who anticipate escalating costs from domestic climate policy:

Watch CBS News Videos Online

Later in the interview he compared climate skeptics to those who still believe that the moon landing was a hoax, commenting that the reasoning behind climate change is ‘as settled as [science] ever gets’. A key part of his message focussed on the Copenhagen climate conference in December, which he believes has a good chance of producing a globally ratified treaty. He says that an alternative outcome would be dire, as ‘we don’t have a lot of time’.

Stephanie Baudains is an intern at Nature Geoscience

Countdown to Copenhagen

oheffernan — 2009-11-03T13:05:33+00:00

Keith Kloor

Prospects for the U.S. congressional climate bill appear grim, writes Juliet Eilperin in the Washington Post:

“With Democrats deeply divided on the issue, unless some Republican lawmakers risk the backlash for signing on to the legislation, there is almost no hope for passage.”

David Roberts at Grist offers a similar prognosis for a bill he says that is already “far weaker than what’s needed.” Because of America’s institutional “political dysfunction,” Roberts predicts:

“There’s every chance it will a) get weaker still and b) fail to pass in the end.”

Amidst this backdrop, cap-and-trade, which is the basis for the congressional climate legislation, is getting raked over the coals again. Two attorneys for the U.S Environmental Protection Agency penned an op-ed for the Washington Post, in which they asserted:

“The House and Senate climate bills are not a first step in the right direction. They would give away valuable rights in cap-and-trade permits and create a trillion-dollar carbon-offsets market that will not lead to needed reductions. Together, the illusion of greenhouse-gas reductions and the creation of powerful lobbies seeking to protect newly created profits in permits and offsets would lock in climate degradation for a decade or more.”

Columbia University’s Jeffrey Sachs in the November/December issue of Scientific American takes a similarly dim view of “the cumbersome cap-and-trade system proposed by the House of Representatives. Too much is at stake, argues Sachs:

“We’ll need to spend trillions of dollars over time to save the planet from climate change. All the more reason not to let lobbyists make a financial game out of this deadly serious effort.”

Did American politicians thus bet on the wrong horse, muses Keith Johnson at the WSJ’s Environmental Capitol? He suggests it might be wise to set aside the conventional wisdom about carbon taxes being “a political dead-end.” Johnson lays out how environmentalists can find common ground with deficit hawks on a climate bill centered on a carbon tax.

Whatever policy instrument eventually gets put in place to reduce carbon emissions, it may still be too late to save the snows of Mount Kilimanjaro, according to a new study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. As The Times of London reports:

“The snows of Mount Kilimanjaro will be gone within two decades, according to scientists who say that the rapid melting of its glacier cap over the past century provides dramatic physical evidence of global climate change.”

Barcelona: The last stop before Copenhagen

oheffernan — 2009-11-03T12:44:27+00:00

Nature reporter Jeff Tollefson will be at the United Nations climate summit from 2-6 November 2009 in Barcelona, Spain. It is the last negotiating period before the seminal climate summit in Copenhagen in December. He'll be blogging at Nature's In the Field blog and here on Climate Feedback. For more on the UN negotations, see www.nature.com/roadtocopenhagen.

Our emissions: 532,151,027,622 and counting

oheffernan — 2009-11-02T18:02:01+00:00

Olive Heffernan

532,151,027,622: that’s the amount of carbon in tonnes that we’ve released into the atmosphere over the past 250 years from burning coal, making cement and chopping down forests, according to the calculations of Oxford University researchers.

You can watch this number climb rapidly on the newly launched website, trillionthtonne.org. Hosted by the Oxford e-Research Centre, it shows in real time just how close we are to reaching one trillion tonnes of cumulative carbon dioxide emissions, the maximum level allowable if we are to limit warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius.

The concept of restricting cumulative emissions to one trillion tonnes comes from work by Oxford climatologist Myles Allen and collaborators, who, in April this year, published two seminal papers in Nature [subscription]. They also wrote a commentary in Nature Reports Climate Change [free access] at the time, explaining the policy implications of their work: essentially, their point is that we need an overall carbon budget, as well as short term emissions targets. That’s because CO2 hangs around in the atmosphere for millennia, which means that peak warming is determined by cumulative emissions, rather than by the rate at which CO2 is emitted over the short-term.

Though a trillion tonnes may sound like rather a lot, the fact that we’re more than half way there is alarming. Unless we start to reduce emissions rapidly, we’ll have released the trillionth tonne by 2045, shows the counter on the website. And we could go way beyond a trillion tonnes by the second half of this century, unless we mitigate, because there are several trillion tonnes of carbon available in fossil fuel reserves.

To make matters worse, the researchers estimate that to have less than a one-in-four chance of global warming exceeding 2°C, we may well need to keep our cumulative emissions to 750,000,000. The challenge is large: emissions will need to start to fall between 2 and 4.5 percent per year immediately and indefinitely if we are to avoid dangerous warming, according to these estimates.

The website was launched on October 22 to coincide with the unveiling at London’s Science Museum of a one tonne heap of anthracite coal, representing the trillionth tonne of carbon to be released into the atmosphere.