Kevin Anderson

@kevinclimate.bsky.social

12752 Followers 522 Following

Professor of Energy & Climate Change at Universities of Manchester & Uppsala. Translating climate science, through carbon budgets, into policy goals & mitigation options. Co-founder https://climateuncensored.com

My quick two penn'orth on the 2°C carbon budget discussion (Kevin Anderson, BlueSky, June 2026) https://bsky.app/profile/thierryaaron.bsky.social/post/3mnjjxebvik2h • The UNFCCC objective is to "prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system". • It’s broadly accepted in negotiations that 1.5°C is a more appropriate benchmark for "dangerous". • By implication, 2°C must already be regarded as dangerous, not as a safe target. • Carbon-budget choices should reflect this, i.e. be guided by precaution not risky political expedience. • In the climate context, a precautionary standard typically implies ~ 83% probability of staying below a given temperature. Many frontline vulnerable communities could reasonably argue for 90% or higher. • Budgets should be based on the latest science, including improved understanding of non-CO₂ emissions and zero-emissions commitment (ZEC), rather than being averaged with much older IPCC-era estimates. • On that basis, I use the carbon budgets published by Forster, Friedlingstein and colleagues (2025). • Updating those budgets to the start of 2026 gives a remaining carbon budget of around 538 GtCO₂ for an 83% chance of limiting warming to below 2°C. • Since we’re halfway through 2026, and no major CO2 cuts are set to occur before January 2027, the practical remaining budget from the start of 2027 falls to around 496 GtCO₂. • To avoid false precision, let's call it 500 GtCO₂, while noting that several potentially important Earth-system feedbacks remain excluded. • Even so, 500 GtCO₂ sits at the optimistic edge of what could reasonably be described as precautionary and still carries around a 17% chance of exceeding 2°C. • Using a larger budget stretch both the wording and the spirit of the UNFCCC, the Paris Agreement, the Glasgow Climate Pact, and recent ICJ guidance. • The 500 GtCO₂ pathway implies global CO₂ emissions falling by 8% a year from 2027 onwards, three percentage points steeper than the peak C…
Photo of a slide with a table of remaining carbon budgets for Paris 1.5-2°C.
Photo of an article from 2012 in which Fatih Birol outlines his deep concern for climate change relating it to the data on fossil fuel exploration & production.
Photo of Uppsala Cathedral- with the Swedish flag in the foreground.
Copy of a sequence of tweets from several years back summarising my suggestion on how we should have operate targets that are not brought together in some highly suspect "net zero" framing.
Statue of John Betjeman looking over a Eurostar train at St Pancras station …
Photo of previous post by Øystein Sjølie.
Plot of deep inequality showing the proportion of income/production that benefits particular groups. Headline: around half of all income/production is taken up by just 10% of the population.
Photo of a table of carbon budgets, timelines, and reduction rates associated with a 50% chance of note exceeding 1.5°C and an 83% chance of not exceeding 2°C.
Photo of text taken from the attached youtube interview: “I’ve come to the view that I don’t think 1.5°C is possible, even if we tried, and I’m saying that with a very heavy heart. The high emitters amongst us have deliberately and knowingly decided that our hedonistic pleasures are more important than the lives and livelihoods of poorer people in climate vulnerable communities and the wellbeing of our own children.”
Photograph of the paragraph from the Lamboll methane article on methane and 1.5°C
Photo of the concluding paragraph in the linked piece on the EU’s recent fall in emissions.