If the denialists are wrong and we go with their recommendations, we lose a viable planet.

Amen!

Even if we stopped all emissions of CO2 right now, atmospheric levels would continue to rise for some time. CO2 stays in the atmosphere a good long time. The oceans that have absorbed about half of the CO2 we have emitted will become a source of CO2. We have set off feed back loops, particularly the melting of the Arctic tundra, that will continue to put more CO2 (and the much-more-powerful CH4) into the atmosphere...

Maybe CO2 emissions will continue to rise because of the various thermal equilibrium effects and radiative effects of CO2/CH4, etc. However, if you look at the CO2 it does suggest that it is possible to greatly reduce the rate of increase or essentially stop it if (and it's a mighty big if you drop back the rate of CO2 addition to the atmosphere to the levels of the late 1960's or early 1970's.

As I heard recently, and long ago concluded myself from the data, it's the cummulative effect that is difficult to deal with given the long residence time and turnover rates of the ocean and the atmosphere in this dynamic equilibrium we see everyday.

In May at Mauna Loa we hit the highest value for CO2 that has been observed at that site and in more than 800,000 years from EPICA data. Today's values are much higher than any previous interglacial we can find in the ice record. No matter what there is a lot of thermal inertia to contend with and that is something to be concerned with.

This is a great response; and it would be nice if it could be broadcast several times a day for a week to everybody on the planet.

But it won't be; and we will continue to burn coal (oil and gas are almost irrelevant in this debate). Here in Australia we dig a lot of coal out of the ground. Trainloads of it pass within 200m of my house every day on its way to the docks to be burnt in China. And that is the real problem. Coal is a huge part of our economy and the government is promoting it and building new facilities to increase exports even as it is trying to pass our very own cap and trade system in parliament. The coal lobby even has offices in government departments and writes energy policy. Huge money changes hands between the government and the industry in taxes that are the paid back as subsidies of one sort or another. Australians, already the fourth worst carbon emitters on a per capita basis (UAE, Kuwait and Saudi are ahead of us) would be the worst by a long way if the CO2 impact of our coal exports were added in. I see no chance that coal will be left in the ground. Sequestration is nonsense; and so I am afraid we are doomed to destroy the viability of human life on this planet.

We could build an economy based on renewables, but it would require a new social order and the dismantling of the coal lobby.

"We are killing the planet to preserve a twisted, completely unrealistic definition of economic success: infinite growth on a limited planet."

Economists (and most of the people in developed or developing countries) would not define it like that because they would not even consider the finite nature of the planet. Success is growth. The opposites, finite and infinite, don't even come into it.

Robert was a bit less sure on climate change but I think he should turn round the argument of the denialist. Robert said, "They view the opposition as putting global economies at risk by putting a price on carbon emissions. While I think environmental devastation is a much worse consequence than economic stagnation, the impact of that could be pretty severe as well." But, as dohboi implies, growth cannot go on forever on a finite planet.

So, given that economic growth has to end, what is the risk of the AGW proponents being wrong? It is that humans have to figure out how to live sustainably a bit earlier than they would otherwise have to. Put that way, the risk of being wrong is tiny compared with the risk of the denialists being wrong.

The fanatics might argue that a bit more growth can help lift living standards for the poor around the world. However, New Scientist buried that one in their special report, How Our Economy Is Killing The Earth, last year.

The bigger problem is the low consumers that are aspiring to be high consumers. They will change the equation much more quickly by increasing consumption where the existing high consumers are on a plateau.

Chilling!!!

Which came first, the political system or the financial system?

Which is more basic?

Gail,

Everybody can call me an unreconctrsucted redneck if they please,or feel better afterwards,but your remarks about secession brought to mind some of bar song about the south rising again and I enjoyed a huge belly laugh-not that I want to see the old south rise again ,but that so many people who once stood for union forever would be spinning in thier graves in regards to thier descendants trying to pull out.

political systems will change

In Drumbeat a couple of days back, I think in NY, some county(ies) refusing to implement the tax policies enacted by legislature. It had to do with funding transportation. I'd have thought the states would be the ones to buck the system, but maybe not. Maybe the counties and towns. Less crap as floated to the top at that point in the political system. Still, this particular form of misrepresentation we have in US works only for the corpos; either the corpos have to go away or some other system has to be evolved. The latter, however, cannot happen in the presence of the corpos.

Gail, political systems will not change as long as the players remain the same. Our so-called-democracy might become more blatantly totalitarian, but it won't actually be a change of system. Not until the class of players change. That won't happen until the table breaks and the entitled generations die.

cfm in Gray, ME

You are changing the scope of this thread, and such a change would go far off the path of the subject. I certainly believe that governments could institute changes that significantly reduce GHG emissions, and that trade pressure could be brought to bear on slow-to-budge nations. But this is not the thread to delve into the details.

Your chart is more helpful in seeing the cumulative change on a global scale (as my first chart was US-only).

The overall concern, though, is that overall GHG emissions are not dropping and radiative forcing continues to climb;

Greenhouse Gases Continue to Climb Despite Economic Slump - NOAA April 21, 2009

Baring major unmodeled feedbacks, CO2 residence is the atmosphere is modeled as a prony series (a sum of time decaying exponential with different time constants). Assuming a linear system, this can be thought of as a greens function for determining future levels based upon an emissions history. In any case the most salient points are that one term decays pretty quickly (year or two IIRC), and mostly represents equilibration with surface waters, while the slowest varying term is also significant and has a time constant of more than a thousand years. With an immediate emissions end, the short term terms would provide quite a bit of reduction for the first few years, then the rate of change would slow down -leaving unmodeled but slow feedbacks a chance to kick in.

To really get them to drop would require some sort of geo-engineering. I believe silicate weathering is on the order of a hundred million tons per year (compared to several billion tons current emissions). It would not be impossible to engineer a reversal, but it would require a very expensive, and environmentally intrusive program.

Gail
I guess this depends on what you mean by economic colapse:

Extended 1930s style depression- I don't think the reduction in energy usage (co2 emissions) would be significant. Elimination of first world discretionary usage would be made up for by the continual increases from the third world. Peak oil induced reductions would be compensated for by lower carbon efficiencies of alternatives such as GTL and CTL.

Complete breakdown of society - One would expect that this would result in the elimination of virtually all industrial emissions and a very large effect on private emissions due to the simple fact of lack of access to fossil fuels.

In between the above is such a difficult thing to predict. Lack of financial capacity could just as well prevent the capital expenditure required to build renewable technologies. Companies, people and governments could just continue to limp along using the current infrastructure because they cannot afford to replace it, resulting in virtually no reductions.