Articles

The world's biggest gamble

Rockstrom, Johan; Schellnhuber, Hans Joachim; Hoskins, Brian; Ramanathan, Veerabhadran; Schlosser, Peter; Brasseur, Guy Pierre; Gaffney, Owen; Nobre, Carlos A.; Meinshausen, Malte; Rogelj, Joeri; Lucht, Wolfgang

The scale of the decarbonisation challenge to meet the Paris Agreement is underplayed in the public arena. It will require precipitous emissions reductions within 40 years and a new carbon sink on the scale of the ocean sink. Even then, the world is extremely likely to overshoot. A catastrophic failure of policy, for example, waiting another decade for transformative policy and full commitments to fossil‐free economies, will have irreversible and deleterious repercussions for humanity's remaining time on Earth. Only a global zero carbon roadmap will put the world on a course to phase‐out greenhouse gas emissions and create the essential carbon sinks for Earth‐system stability, without which, world prosperity is not possible.

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Also Published In

Title
Earth's Future
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1002/2016EF000392

More About This Work

Academic Units
Earth Institute
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
Geochemistry
Published Here
January 24, 2019