30 November, 2012

2° be or not 2° be

Authors

Marion Vieweg, Bill Hare, Niklas Höhne, Michiel Schaeffer, Joeri Rogelj, Julia Larkin, Hanna Fekete, Carl-Friedrich Schleussner

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Limiting global warming below 2°C – or even to below 1.5°C remains technically and economically feasible, but only with political ambition backed by rapid action starting now. If nothing more is done except the current pledges, costs would be much higher to reach deeper reductions necessary later, and/or the damage from climate impacts would be far greater. Society also would lose the ability to choose whether it wants technologies like carbon capture and storage and nuclear energy, because those, along with bio-energy, would likely have to be deployed on a larger scale.

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