Despite all the noise surrounding climate targets and budgets, the world is heading for well over 2.5 degrees Celsius of warming108 – a level that would drastically reduce the carrying capacity of the planet and probably consign billions of people to suffering and death.

Climate catastrophe is coming. We know this. What we don’t know is how bad it will be. In the best case scenario, an unprecedented global Green New Deal rapidly transitions the world economy off of carbon, holding global temperature rise under 3°C.61 This causes large-scale polar ice melt, 12 inches of sea level rise by 2050,62 and major habitat di

If industry prevails and we stick with a business-as-usual scenario — and pretty much all data indicates this is what we are doing — we’ll blow through our carbon budget in less than seven years.9 Global temperature rise will continue on its trajectory of 3°C10 increase or worse by the end of the century, and, in environmentalist Bill McKibben’s wo

If industry prevails and we stick with a business-as-usual scenario — and pretty much all data indicates this is what we are doing — we’ll blow through our carbon budget in less than seven years.9 Global temperature rise will continue on its trajectory of 3°C10 increase or worse by the end of the century, and, in environmentalist Bill McKibben’s wo

of succeeding, according to a recent study based on current emissions trends, are one in 20. If by some miracle we are able to limit warming to two degrees, we will only have to negotiate the extinction of the world’s tropical reefs, sea-level rise of several meters and the abandonment of the Persian Gulf. The climate scientist James Hansen has cal