Climate Changed
Meeting Paris Agreement Targets Will Take Massive Cuts in Emissions
To keep global temperatures from rising less than two degrees, we must begin to reduce emissions sooner rather than later, according to a new study.
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Meeting the Paris accord’s temperature targets will take massive cuts to greenhouse gas emissions within 15 years, but won’t require them to be reduced to zero, according to a new study published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change.
If those targets—between 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius (2.7 to 3.6 Fahrenheit)—are overshot, the consequences would likely require both drastic cuts to emissions and geoengineering efforts to remove carbon from the atmosphere, according to the paper by Katsumasa Tanaka at the National Institute for Environmental Studies in Japan and Brian O’Neill at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research.