I assume that there are very good, rigorously tested scientific reasons that support the selection of 450PPM as the goal. Reasons that represent consequences so devastating that any reasonable man would agree as to the absolute necessity of submitting to a highly restrictive and coercive regime, spending tens of trillions of dollars in diverted investments and foregone economic growth and denying the poorer nations of the world access to much of modern civilization. Because if it's just a convenient line in the sand and the really dangerous upper boundary for atmospheric CO2 concentrations is higher then the demand that the world submit to the global warming regime immediately is both fraudulent and immoral. After all, the higher the true 'danger' zone the more time we have to solve the problem later when we are richer and more technologically sophisticated. So I assume 450PPM is a serious boundary produced by serious people.
Which is tragic because all the evidence says that we are going to blow past the 450 ppm benchmark. Recently President Obama returned from China having gotten the Chinese to commit to lowering greenhouse gas emissions. But not now. First they are going to double their current green house gas emissions and then if everything goes right in sixteen years they will begin working on reducing them. Honest, they swear. And without the Chinese, the Indians, Indonesians and Brazilians and all the other poor countries agreeing to immediately begin stunting their own economic growth in the name of global CO2 reductions there is no way on God's increasingly green earth that CO2 emissions are going to stabilize at 450 PPM and everyone who is anyone knows it. After all, the Chinese just told us so.
Here's a list of the ten most populous countries in the world today. Only the United States has made any progress towards green house gas reductions and eight of the remaining nine are poor and like China have no intention of sacrificing their economic growth to hit a carbon dioxide concentration number. Even worse many of the rich 'AGW believer' nations seem to have lost their enthusiasm for the cause. Germany and Japan are busily scrapping their rather massive nuclear power infrastructures and replacing them with...coal and natural gas. Australia has formally abandoned its goals, Canada is producing 'dirty' tar sands oil by the millions of barrelfuls while Germany and Spain have cancelled their renewable subsidy programs. The UK has tried so hard to go green that it is facing widespread power shortages in the dead of winter.
So if you believe that going much beyond 450PPM has catastrophic implications amounting to many tens of trillions of dollars and if you know that nothing we can do to will prevent that CO2 concentration from occurring then wouldn't the logical next step be to focus on adaptation and mitigation strategies? An administration that truly believed the concentrations much beyond the 450 PPM target would lead to disaster would be doing everything it can to develop mitigation and adaptation capabilities. They would not be wasting very much time fine tuning predictive climate models or doing more tree ring analysis. Because if 450 is "it" then the time for science is over and the time for engineering needs to begin.
And yet no one who is prominent in the AGW cause nor any official body is advocating that the nations of the world pivot from CO2 reduction to AGW mitigation/adaptation. Indeed the AGW leadership is by and large opposed to such measures. In this respect the IPCC and company are behaving more skeptically about the dangers of AGW than skeptics like me. They are behaving very strangely for a group convinced that such a catastrophic outcome for the earth is looming that it requires that the world give them enormous power and spend tens of trillions of dollars at their direction while lavishly funding their research priorities.
Oops, never mind.
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