้cumulative added carbon in 2100. In the new study, Tokarska and her colleagues asked what would happen if all known and recoverable fossil fuel resources were used.
the IpPCC's worst-case projection is a temperature rise of 2.6 degrees C by 2100, and the few studies that go beyond that year suggest that warming would slow because of the physics of greenhouse gases at high concentrations. Tokarska and her team say that these past projections failed to include the complex give-and-take of carbon on Earth . most importantly, ocean-like a saturated sponge-lose their ability to absorb more heat and carbon,leaving it nowhere to go but the atmosphere.
OF course, no one can say whether civilization will continue to burn oil and coal as long as it's available. sheik Ahmed Yamani,suadi Arabia's oil minister in the 1970s, famously said the stone Age didn't end because humanity ran out of stoness, and the oil age will end before it runs out of oil but experts suspect that continued burning of fossil fuel is virtually inevitable until cleaner alternatives are cheaper and widely available globally.
Allen says the new findings are important at a time when some climate action opponents assert that warming would have beneficial effects.
the Ipcc's limited time horizon can create such a misperception,says Matthew Huber, an earth scientist at both Purdue and the University of new Hampshire.
"The fixation on what happens by the year 2100 is unhealthy and ignores the large risks that become apparent when thinking on longer time scales and with a more complete treatment of real physical and biological processes," he says.