But world governments are deeply divided on how to portion out the remaining carbon budget.
It also covers over 60% of current global greenhouse gas emissions and nearly 90% of the remaining carbon budget up to 2050.
By heating a silicon carbide wafer to about 1,300 degrees Celsius, the silicon atoms on the surface evaporate, and the remaining carbon atoms rearrange into graphene.
This balance puts us on track to exhaust our remaining carbon budget before the end of 2044 under a carbon intensive trajectory.
"These emissions will account for 0.01% of the world's and 0.25% of Australia's remaining carbon budget having regard to the 2C target [to limit climate change impacts globally]," she wrote.
They're out there every day, hunting for more hydrocarbons, even though their current reserves of oil and gas will release seven gigatonnes of carbon dioxide - 1% of the world's remaining carbon budget.
"If there is a positive feedback as the authors calculate, this would only add to the urgency of reducing emissions as rapidly as possible in order to minimise that feedback and to minimise the impact on the remaining carbon budget".
He reframes the climate change story by using three figures which boil down to: we can't burn all of the world's remaining carbon fuels, because if we do, we will raise the planet's temperature to a catastrophic level.
This raises key questions of how to allocate the remaining "carbon budget" fairly among countries, an issue that some climate negotiators fear could wreck the UN climate talks, which are supposed to culminate in a global agreement on emissions in 2015.
It is now possible to heat a silicon carbide wafer to about 1,300 degrees Celsius (nearly 2,400 Fahrenheit), causing the silicon atoms on the surface to evaporate and the remaining carbon atoms to rearrange themselves into the hexagonal graphene shape.
