Fight against climate change runs into cold hard reality

A growing body of evidence suggests that the power plants, buildings, cars, trucks, ships and planes in use today are likely to emit enough CO2 over their lifetime for the world to miss that target. Coal plants alone could blow the carbon budget for 1.5 degrees C of warming, the lower threshold also mentioned in the agreement, unless they are shut down early.
“For 1.5 degrees we would have to start retiring things like crazy and we wouldn’t be able to build anything new,” says University of California, Irvine, scientist Steven Davis. “Two degrees is starting to look equally bleak.”
That hasn’t quite sunk in amid the fanfare surrounding the Paris Agreement, which entered into force with record pace.
Temperatures have already risen by about 1 degree C since the industrial revolution, when countries started burning fossil fuels for energy.
In 2010 Davis and others estimated that the world’s existing energy infrastructure had locked in 496 billion tons of CO2 emissions if left to operate for their expected lifetime. By 2013, as hundreds of additional power plants had come online in Asia, the number rose to 729 billion tons.
“By my latest calculations, we’re close to 800 billion tons now,” Davis says.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/climate-change-paris-agreement-todays-carbon-emissions/