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Today at the annual United Nations climate conference in Poland, scientists announced some unwelcome news: Fossil fuel emissions rose sharply again this year, and total emissions in 2018 will reach a record 41.5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide.
Only a few years ago, it looked as if global emissions had plateaued and had perhaps even peaked, and many hoped that the world had started down the long, hard journey toward weaning itself off carbon-based energy. Over the past decade, renewable energy use did indeed expand dramatically—but so did the burning of oil, gas, and even coal. That growth outstripped any carbon-neutralizing gains from renewables.
There's a limit—a budget, essentially—to how much carbon dioxide we can release and still avoid a level of climate chaos that would fundamentally transform modern life. And we're increasingly at risk of blowing right past it.
"We are at a pivotal point in the history of human civilization on our planet," says Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University and one of the authors of the U.S. government's recent National Climate Assessment.
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