Fekete Balázs M
Department of Civil Engineering, City College of New York, City University of New York, New York, USA.
Environmental Sciences Initiative, Advanced Science Research Center at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, USA.
Sci Rep. 2025 Apr 25;15(1):14490. doi: 10.1038/s41598-025-98459-1.
Climate change skeptics like to point to the high atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration in paleo records as "proof" of the exaggeration of the climate change agenda. Instead of debunking these arguments, the present paper represents a thought experiment that considers the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration in the past as a proxy for fossil fuel reserves and interprets the contemporary rise in carbon dioxide concentration as a fuel gauge to estimate the exhaustion of the remaining fossil fuel reserves under different energy consumption scenarios. The resulting conclusion is that the dangers of exhausting the remaining fossil fuel resources are likely on par with the anticipated adverse effects of climate change and should convince even climate change skeptics that the transition to non-fossil energy sources is inevitable and urgent since the remaining fossil fuel reserves will be likely exhausted in less than a century. The presented analysis goes further than the currently adopted "net-zero" ambitions. It demonstrates that there is no room for compromise and the transition has to be "true-zero" use of fossil fuels. Accounting gimmicks like carbon capture and sequestration or carbon trading are just as unsustainable as the continued reliance on fossil fuels.
气候变化怀疑论者喜欢将古气候记录中高浓度的大气二氧化碳作为“证据”，用以证明气候变化议程被夸大。本文并非要驳斥这些观点，而是进行了一项思想实验，将过去的大气二氧化碳浓度视为化石燃料储量的替代指标，并将当代二氧化碳浓度的上升解读为一个燃料表，用以估算在不同能源消耗情景下剩余化石燃料储量的枯竭情况。得出的结论是，耗尽剩余化石燃料资源的危险可能与气候变化预期的不利影响相当，这甚至应能让气候变化怀疑论者信服，向非化石能源的转型是不可避免且紧迫的，因为剩余化石燃料储量可能在不到一个世纪内耗尽。所呈现的分析比目前所采用的“净零”目标更进一步。它表明没有妥协的余地，转型必须是对化石燃料的“真零”使用。诸如碳捕获与封存或碳交易等会计手段与持续依赖化石燃料一样不可持续。
