Why emissions reductions are urgent
It is not well understood how difficult it will be to avoid the worst effects of climate change if we delay emissions reductions. Many think, erroneously, that achieving peak emissions in 2030 will have the same consequences as if they peak now. This is essentially a failure to understand that the impacts of climate change are a consequence of the accumulation of atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases not emissions per year. The longer that emissions continue to increase, the longer that atmospheric CO2 concentrations will increase. Even if we eliminated all emissions today, CO2 concentrations will remain high for millennia (Clark et al. 2016).