The climate crisis is much more severe than most people and politicians realise. Most information, education and media reporting around climate change (global heating) focuses on reducing our annual emissions to a target based on a ‘trajectory of progressive reduction’, and eventually ‘net’ zero annual emissions by 2050 or some other date.
But this ignores the reality that it is the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and their contribution to radiative forcing in real time that actually drive global heating.
We are sending the wrong message by focusing on annual carbon emissions based on 100-year global warming potential