So, where does the carbon budget stand today? What accounting tricks go into calculating it? And how will the world (and Australia) divvy up a fair share at the COP climate summit in Glasgow? Now, countries opening up more fossil fuel projects, from monster coal mines in Australia to drilling for oil in the Arctic, could blow it even faster. It’s known as the carbon budget and, while there are different calculations set against different thresholds of acceptable temperature increase (your 1.5 degrees versus your 2-degree budget), scientists agree there’s not much left in the war chest. Scientists tell us there is a set amount of carbon dioxide we can burn before things really start to unravel again for the climate. Saving the planet now comes down to politics – and accounting. And we’ve known how to fix it since the 1980s, with the emergence of renewable energy technology to replace CO2-belching fossil fuels. It’s been going off since at least the 1950s, when the first measurements found too much planet-warming carbon dioxide was being pumped into the atmosphere. The dinosaurs didn’t have an early-warning system for their climate-changing crisis, but we do. That was 66 million years ago, and a meteorite the size of a city had just slammed into the planet, vaporising rock and forest and wiping out the dinosaurs.

When scientists trawl through the Earth’s temperature record, they can find only one other time when it changed as rapidly as it is changing today because of human-driven global warming. Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size

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