Fact Check: Pete Buttigieg Claims Without Evidence Only 12 Years to Stop Global Warming

South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg is wrong to say that Americans only have 12 years to address climate change before it becomes too late.

Buttigieg claimed during Tuesday night’s 2020 Democrat presidential debate that America and the world only have 12 years to address climate change.

However, some leftists claim that the world only has 14 months to address climate change.

Further, it appears that many scientific publications have claimed that there are many different dates through which the world must address global pollution before it’s too late.

Popular Science claimed in 2017 that the world only has three years to address climate change.

In 1992 at the Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, climate summit, climate activists said that the world only had ten years to get climate change under control.

One Forbes science writer explained why so many people misread the climate reports on why the world may only have 12 years to address climate change. Michael Marshall explained:

The researchers examined what it would take to limit global warming to either 1.5°C or 2°C. They first ask how certain we want to be: we could either have a 67% probability of meeting our target, or a 95% probability. In other words, we could give ourselves a two-to-one chance of limiting warming to a desired amount, or a twenty-to-one chance.

Next they ask how rapidly we can increase renewable energy’s share of the market: 2% per year, or a more ambitious 5% per year. And finally they ask whether we will use lots of “negative emissions technologies” later this century, to remove carbon dioxide from the air on an industrial scale and thus limit the temperature rise.

“The point is that the climate is not so simple as to give us a neat cutoff date for action,” Marshall added.