A major driver of global climate change is emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO₂ into the atmosphere from human activities involving burning of fossil fuels for transportation, electric power generation, manufacturing, home heating, and so forth. Global average temperatures are now slightly higher than 1°C above their pre-Industrial Revolution levels. Damaging sea level rise and extreme weather events (such as the recent wildfires in Canada that led to the unhealthy air in NYC last week) will become an increasingly major problem around the world if global average temperature rises more than 1.5°C Scientists estimate that the total additional amount of CO₂ that we can put into the atmosphere without reaching the 1.5°C level is about 400 Gigatons (Gt) of carbon dioxide. Let's call that our carbon budget. In this discussion, we want to use calculus to analyze the predictions of various model scenarios regarding the rate of carbon dioxide emissions (in Gt per year) and the accumulated total emissions in each case. 2.