What would happen if we burn all of the world’s coal and oil? Plot spoiler… it’s bad news.

The World Coal Foundation states that there are 892 billion tonnes of coal worldwide, equivalent to around 100 years of usage at current rates of production. By comparison oil and gas have a mere 52 and 54 years left of reserves. The world’s biggest coal producer is China.

A 2015 study by Science Advances posed such a question. Among other changes unlikely to lead to much happiness – increased desertification, a reduction in arable land, and the fact that large swathes of the earth would be uninhabitable the paper focused on the impact on the Antarctic ice sheet.

In a paper entitled “Combustion of  available fossil fuel resources sufficient to eliminate the Antarctic ice sheet” a team of researchers from institutions including the Potsdam Institute for Climate Change and the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of California set out the challenges facing the earth in the event that such assets don’t stay “stranded”.

The paper noted that the fossil fuels in the ground would release a staggering 10,000 gigatonnes of carbon into the atmosphere. At such a level the amount of water released from ice melting from the West Antarctica sheet would raise sea levels by three metres.

While the research goes into great detail about the circumstances surrounding such a melt, it is fair to say that the consequences would be disastrous.