This article is about the global warming as an argument that moves on to politics and business, Alan Rusbridger explains the thinking behind our major series on the climate crisis. Also there are some reasons changes to the Earth’s climate rarely make it to the top of the news list. The changes may be happening too fast for human comfort, but they happen too slowly for the news makers – and, to be fair, for most readers. For the purposes of their coming coverage, they will assume that the scientific consensus about man-made climate change and its likely effects is overwhelming. They will leave the skeptics and deniers to waste their time challenging the science. The mainstream argument has moved on to the politics and economics. There are three really simple numbers which explain this: 2C: There is overwhelming agreement – from governments, corporations, NGOs, banks, scientists, you name it – that a rise in temperatures of more than 2C by the end of the century would lead to disastrous consequences for any kind of recognized global order. 565 gigatons: “Scientists estimate that humans can pour roughly 565 more gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by mid-century and still have some reasonable hope of staying below 2C,” is how McKibben crisply puts it. Few dispute that this idea of a global “carbon budget” is broadly right. 2,795 gigatons: This is the amount of carbon dioxide that if they were burned would be released from the proven reserves of fossil fuel, the fuel we are planning to extract and use
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/mar/06/climate-change-guardian-threat-to-earth-alan-rusbridger
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