Moreover, because of the unforgiving nature of carbon math — once you emit a ton of carbon dioxide, you can’t get it back, and it accumulates steadily in the atmosphere — there is exceedingly little time to change course and increase ambitions. That’s mostly just plain carbon dioxide, but it also includes emissions of methane, nitrous oxide, and other greenhouse gases that are converted into units comparable to carbon dioxide. If you leave those out, the pure carbon dioxide emissions are about 36 billion tons per year. These scenarios often have the world removing net amounts carbon dioxide from the atmosphere after 2050, rather than putting more there. Every year, we bank more carbon emissions in the atmosphere.

Source: Washington Post November 03, 2016 11:44 UTC