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Greenhouse gas emissions will have to be eliminated completely to stabilise
the Earth's climate and prevent temperatures from rising. That’s the conclusion
of climatologists in the US who say that our current efforts to merely stabilise
emissions will not be enough.
Damon Matthews, from Concordia University in Canada, and Ken Caldeira, from the
Carnegie Institution for Science, Stanford, USA, used a global climate model to
study how greenhouse emissions would need to change in order to stabilise global
temperatures over the next few hundred years. Previous studies have only looked
at what happens when emissions are stabilised.
Humans have been releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in increasing
quantities since the industrial revolution. But to simplify the simulation,
Matthews and Caldeira injected a single pulse of carbon dioxide into a
pre-industrial atmosphere.
Pulse sizes of 50, 200, 500 and 2000 billion ...