Have time? not too much

CLIMATECLOCK

The Lifeline and Deadline on the Climate Clock tell us what we need to do, by when. There is still time to avert climate disaster, but only if we take bold, immediate action at the speed and scale necessary – beyond what politicians have deemed politically possible.

The Climate Emergency is here. The next ~7 years is humanity’s best window to enact bold, transformational changes in our global economy to avoid raising global temperature above 1.5ºC warming, a point of no return that science tells us will make the worst climate impacts likely inevitable.

The DEADLINE on the clock alerts us to the critical time window we have left to take the most meaningful action to limit global warming. The new LIFELINE on the clock shows the percent of global energy coming from renewable sources – wind, water, solar, and bioenergy. The Renewable Energy Lifeline is currently at 12.2% and rising. However, it is not rising nearly fast enough to meet our deadline.

Together, the DEADLINE and LIFELINE give us a key mission: We must build a 100% renewable future in as close to 7 years as possible, if we want to avert worst case scenario climate impacts.

The Clock tells us what we need to do, by when. We can’t pretend we have more time than we do

DEADLINE - Carbon Budget for 1.5ºC

In 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published a Special Report outlining feasible greenhouse emissions pathways to limit global warming to 1.5ºC. In this report, IPCC researchers estimated that, beginning in 2018, humans could release an additional 420Gt of carbon into the atmosphere and still have a 67% chance of limiting warming to 1.5ºC.

The Climate Clock deadline shows how long we have left until this carbon budget runs out, given the amount of carbon we continue to emit globally. We must take action to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions to zero as quickly as possible within this critical time window for action.

The clock will continue to run down until it hits zero, at which time our carbon budget would be depleted and the likelihood of devastating global climate impacts would be very high.

Data for the deadline is sourced from the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change. The MCC’s carbon clock assumes an average annual rate of 42 Gt of carbon emissions in order to calculate the time remaining on the clock; however, if rates of global emissions continue to rise, our carbon budget will run out even faster. If we cut the rate of global carbon emissions, time on the clock would hypothetically begin to increase.

LIFELINE #1 - Renewable Energy

Around three-quarters of global greenhouse gas emissions come from the burning of fossil fuels for energy. To reduce global emissions we need to rapidly shift our energy systems away from fossil fuels to renewable sources of energy – especially wind and solar.

This lifeline represents the percentage share of global energy consumption generated by renewable resources. We must transition our global energy system away from fossil fuels and increase this lifeline to 100% as soon as possible.

“Renewable energy” refers to the sum of energy generated from hydropower, solar, wind, geothermal, wave and tidal, and bioenergy sources. It does not include energy from traditional biomass (wood, crop residues, and charcoal), as data collection from these sources is limited.

Data for the Renewable Energy Lifeline is sourced from Our World In Data, an open source database and a project of the Global Change Data Lab and the Oxford Martin Programme on Global Development at Oxford University.

According to Our World in Data, renewable energy made up 11.41% of the share of global primary energy consumption in 2019. The clock currently assumes an annual percentage change in renewable energy share of 5.655% relative to the previous year -- the average growth rate in renewable energy share from 2016-2019. This rate is updated each year as annual data becomes available.

Full Citation: Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser (2020) - "Renewable Energy". Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/renewable-energy' [Online Resource].