Remaining carbon budgets — uncertainties and prospects for informing climate mitigation efforts

Remaining carbon budgets define the quantity of future CO2 emissions that we are still allowed to emit while limiting global warming to a given target.

Remaining carbon budgets have recently gained considerable attention in public and policy circles, but are subject to large uncertainties that can impede their ability to inform climate mitigation efforts.

In this presentation I will provide an overview of the current state of knowledge surrounding estimates of the remaining carbon budget.

I will discuss the range of uncertainties affecting estimates of the remaining carbon budget and will present a new framework that better quantifies these uncertainties to produce a coherent distribution of the remaining carbon budget for 1.5 and well-below 2°C of global warming.