2017: Carbon Brief’s end-of-year review
49 countries
For CO2 emissions to fall, they first have to peak. And research published this year suggests that this is already happening.
The report, produced by the US-based World Resources Institute (WRI), suggests that 49 countries – which include the UK, US, Australia, Brazil and Canada – have seen their emissions peak, representing around 36% of current global emissions.
Carbon Brief created an interactive chart of WRI’s data as part of our coverage.
But how much time does the world collectively have left to reduce its emissions in order to avoid dangerous climate change?
At the beginning of the year, Carbon Brief published our traditional carbon budget update, revealing that just four years of current CO2 emissions would blow what’s left of the budget for a good chance of keeping global temperature rise to 1.5C.
However, in September, a new study published in Nature Geoscience proposed that there might be a little more breathing space to meet the 1.5C limit than previously thought.
As lead author Dr Richard Millar explained in a guest post, the study estimates the remaining 1.5C carbon budget from today onwards. This contrasts to previous methods which have been based on cumulative emissions to date. As a result, Millar’s study put the remaining 1.5C budget at around 20 years of current emissions.
The paper caused quite a stir, with parts of the media claiming that climate models – the basis for carbon budget estimates – are “wrong” and have overstated the observed warming of the planet.
Carbon Brief factchecked these claims, showing that the model-observation comparisons in the study depend greatly on the dataset and model outputs used by the authors.
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