To Avoid Catastrophic Effects, World Emissions Have To Be Negative After 2050?

Reuters AlertNet :

To avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change, world carbon emissions will have to drop to near zero by 2050 and "go negative" after that, the Worldwatch Institute reported on Tuesday.

This is a deeper cut than called for by most climate experts and policymakers, including President-elect Barack Obama, who favors an 80 percent drop in U.S. carbon emissions by mid-century.

Limiting carbon emissions aims to keep global mean temperature from rising more than 3.6 degrees F (2 degrees C) over what it was before the Industrial Revolution -- but one Worldwatch author said even this is too dangerous.

Read the whole story: Reuters AlertNet

Comments

[mamacat]

While I am not prepared to accept the notion that we have gotten to the point that the human race must actually pursue the goal of sequestering more CO2 than it produces, I think it makes a lot of sense to do a lot more than we have been doing to develop clean energy sources.

Watching the Senate confirmation hearings, it looks like the Obama team is going to pursue Nuclear energy expansion. In the relative short term, that may be necessary, but I sure wouldn't want to live near one again. (The worst nuclear spill in U.S. history was in Southern California, in the Santa Susanna mountains, at a rocketdyne nuclear test facility, not at Three Mile Island.)

At this point, we have so much work to do to get off of oil and coal, that any talk of taking CO2 out of the atmosphere seems like a pipe dream.

[LITNUP]

Yikes ,,,, the globalphobiacs are the ones causing catastrophic effects on the planet ...... sea ice at same levels since 1979.... temps are going Down and more horses asses than horses in the lunatic fringe of globalwarming eco terrorists

[little old lady]

my, oh my, where did you get this information? Sea ice the same? Temps going down? listening to the program "WrongScience" again? Tune in to another channel, please!

as for more horses asses than horses, I haven't noticed

[little old lady]

to reply further to LITNUP, with more concrete info: maybe you saw the reports that sea ice was the same last winter. That happened because there was an unusually cold winter...B­UT:

8/27/08, USA Today reported the following:

"WASHINGTON (AP) — More ominous signs Wednesday have scientists saying that a global warming "tipping point" in the Arctic is happening before their eyes: Sea ice in the Arctic Ocean has melted to its second lowest level since satellite observations began.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center in the U.S. state of Colorado reported that the extent of sea ice in the Arctic is down to 2.03 million square miles. The lowest point since 1979 is 1.65 million square miles set last September.­.."

[MGhamma]

Yikes. www.nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/. Better know what you're talking about before you comment, LITNUP.

[wdw505]

well guess what that is not in touch with reality...­........

[KillTheMessenger]

Why not? One of the things that we could do, and possibly will have to do anyway to save our soils is soil carbon sequestration. There is most likely no other way to preserve the most valuable soils of this planet and it solves two problems at the same time on an immense scale.