This means people in industrialised nations will have to cut down their carbon dioxide emissions to values reaching 10% to 20% of the current values. So we should aim to reduce our carbon footprint to 2 tons per capita per year until 2050. In a fair world, there is absolutely no justification for the western world to pollute the Earth more than others. Have a look at the CO2 emissions per capita by country to see how far away from this goal value of 2 tons per year our western life style is. Alternatively, you can have a look at some simulation results how global warming can be stopped below 2 C. Based on an average carbon footprint, you can test ways to mitigate global warming yourself.
#IM PRO GLOBAL WARMING DOWNLOAD#
Download and use our Excel calculator to simulate cause and effects of global warming. In the following years, the emissions will need again to be cut by half. By 2050, the world-wide average CO2 emission per capita needs to be reduced to 2 tons per year. For North America it was about 20 tons and for Europe about 10 tons per year per capita.
The world-wide average CO2 emissions by capita was about 4 tons per year in 2005. At the same time more and more developing countries will progress their industrialisation and as a result they will want to copy our western life style causing high CO2 emissions. However one should keep in mind that the world population will grow from 6.4 billion people in 2007 to about 9.5 billion people in 2050. At the first glance, this does not look like a major reduction. To reach this target the annual global CO2 emissions have to be reduced from about 28 Gigatons in 2006 to 20 Gigatons of CO2 by the year 2050 and to 10 Gigatons of CO2 by the year 2100 according to IPCC. For example the European Union (EU) has committed itself to this threshold already in 2005. Mitigation goals for the main cause of global warming: carbon dioxide emissionsĪs a result of the above mentioned findings, there seems to be a consensus among the leading developed countries that the temperature increase caused by global warming must not exceed 2° C (3.6° F). See here for some graphs about the increasing concentration of greenhouse gases and the greenhouse gas emissions by sector. A warming of 2° C (3.6° F) corresponds to a carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration of about 450 ppm (parts per million) in the atmosphere.Īs of beginning of 2007, the CO2 concentration is already at 380 ppm and it raises on average 2 – 3 ppm each year, so that the critical value will be reached in approximately 20 to 30 years from now. Recent investigations have shown that inconceivable catastrophic changes in the environment will take place if the global temperatures increase by more than 2° C (3.6° F). Chart 3: Increase of global average temperature for the last 20 years (source: wri.org)
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