Fossil Fuels Need to Stay Unburned to Meet Climate Target

Most known reserves of fossil fuels will need to stay unburned to stop temperatures rising beyond a United Nations target that seeks to curb climate-change dangers.

About 531 billion metric tons of carbon have been emitted by burning oil, coal and gas, cutting down forests and making cement since 1750, the UN said today. Capping greenhouse gas output at 840 billion tons gives a 50 percent chance of meeting the UN target of restraining warming below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), it said in its first such estimate.

“This gives you an indication of the space that’s available to us in terms of how much greenhouse gases we can emit to have a chance of stabilizing the Earth’s climate,” Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said today in an interview in Stockholm.

The data suggest the bulk of known fuel reserves will need to stay in the ground to meet the limit. Reserves reported by listed companies, or a quarter of the total, equate to 762 billion tons of carbon-dioxide emissions, said a report this year by the London School of Economics’ climate research unit and nonprofit Climate Tracker Initiative. That amount of CO2 contains 208 billion tons of carbon.

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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-27/fossil-fuels-need-to-stay-unburned-to-meet-climate-target.html