Carbon Budget, or CO budget2 In Italian, it is a very simple concept and for this frightening: It indicates the amount of carbon dioxide that we can still issue in the atmosphere before the fateful threshold of 1.5 ° C for the increase in temperatures is exceeded forever. If you want more precise numbers, at the beginning of 2025 we still had 130 billion tons of co2 Before going into climatic bankruptcy.
A study published on Earth System Science Data Leeds now guard us from the Priestley Center for Climate Futures: we still have little time to reverse the course, because At the current rhythms of emissions we will exhaust the budget within three years.
Record on record (negative). The study does not speak only of CO’s budget2: It is an overall look at the entire climatic situation of the planet, published annually and now in its third edition. The contents of the relationship are predictably discouraged: the global temperatures are increasingly higher, and the rhythm to which they increase grows continuously.
Every year We break some records in terms of greenhouse gas emissionsand this year the report also took into account the increase in level of the oceans and the quantity of global rainfall.
Dangerously not exceptional. In short, the picture is Fosco, as we already knew, and in this sense the 2025 ratio is not too different from that of 2024 – perhaps just a little more frightening. In the text we even read that the average temperatures of 2024 have been “dangerously not exceptional”, as if to say that by now We are getting used to extreme values: between 2015 and 2024, The global temperatures were on average 1.24 ° C higher of those of the pre-industrial era: human activities are responsible for an increase of 1.22 ° C (the remaining 0.02 ° C are due to natural causes).
The dawn of a “new normality”. This is as regards the past and the present. However, the future is even more worrying: in the last decade, we have entered an average of 53 billion tons of co2 per year. Take the counts with the remaining budget (the 130 billion tons mentioned at the beginning) and you will understand why the climatic balance is one step away from bankruptcy, and only three years are missing so that this occurs – provided that the rhythm of emissions does not increase further.
The alarm does not stop there: continuing with this rhythm, we only have nine years before exhausting the balance that we need to maintain the average increase below 1.6 ° C, if not even 1.7, two values that we hoped that we never faced but that risk being the “new normal” with which we will have to deal.
