Actual Carbon Emissions vs. IPCC Scenarios - how far away is safety?

[GliderGuider]

27. You don't trust Bill McKibben?

According to McKibben's numbers, we have enough fossil fuel (2795 GtC) to last until about 2090 on my projection.

Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

This number is the scariest of all – one that, for the first time, meshes the political and scientific dimensions of our dilemma. It was highlighted last summer by the Carbon Tracker Initiative, a team of London financial analysts and environmentalists who published a report in an effort to educate investors about the possible risks that climate change poses to their stock portfolios. The number describes the amount of carbon already contained in the proven coal and oil and gas reserves of the fossil-fuel companies, and the countries (think Venezuela or Kuwait) that act like fossil-fuel companies. In short, it's the fossil fuel we're currently planning to burn. And the key point is that this new number – 2,795 – is higher than 565. Five times higher.

The Carbon Tracker Initiative – led by James Leaton, an environmentalist who served as an adviser at the accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers – combed through proprietary databases to figure out how much oil, gas and coal the world's major energy companies hold in reserve. The numbers aren't perfect – they don't fully reflect the recent surge in unconventional energy sources like shale gas, and they don't accurately reflect coal reserves, which are subject to less stringent reporting requirements than oil and gas. But for the biggest companies, the figures are quite exact: If you burned everything in the inventories of Russia's Lukoil and America's ExxonMobil, for instance, which lead the list of oil and gas companies, each would release more than 40 gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

The question is not whether the fuel is available. It most assuredly is, at least till 2090 or so on that projection and even longer if the curve is lower. The questions are: will we be able to substitute carbon-free energy to a sufficient scale to make burning it unnecessary and economically unattractive, and whether or not other events - like a widespread socioeconomic disintegration of some sort, perhaps due to rapid climate change - will make burning it impossible. I say the answer to the first question is,"No, we won't," and the answer to the second is, "Quite probably."

Can I ask what you base your doubts on?