Hope for the future

This is not intended to be a regular blog but a pointer to facilitate study of climate change and promotion for the www.350.org organisation.

My current viewpoint will be of interest to me in the years to come as the climate change now predicted advances.

Summary
350.org has, in my view, the best overall understanding of the situation and the necessary remedies. Governments, through the IPCC, have conditioned their responses to limit temperature rises to 2 degrees centigrade. This would be a level of temperature not seen on earth for the past 650,000 years and so the side effects would be difficult to predict accurately.
Prediction of temperatures has been poor to date and while it may improve it cannot be relied upon. As an example, the rapid loss of the Arctic Ice in 2007 was unpredicted and scientists revised their prediction of the total loss of Summer ice for 100 years to 10 years as a result.

Skeptics can dispute various temperature predictions to good effect but cannot deny the rising level of CO2 in the atmosphere, from 350ppm in history to 385ppm at present. The damage this has caused in the oceans to coral and shellfish cannot be denied.

The only safe course must be to return to pre industrial levels of CO2, at least until predictions become more reliable. We have only one environment so the acceptable level of risk of irreversible change must be very low.

A return to 350ppm will require declaration of states of emergency in every nation, carbon rationing to distribute limited resources fairly, elimination of nearly all combustion, carbon capture and possibly global cooling. This is well covered in 'Climate Code Red' by David Spratt & Philip Sutton which is a must for a good overview of the subject.