Sunday, May 31, 2015

Its Keeling Over



Climate change has already passed the tipping point, as has been documented by NASA and many other scientific sources. We're headed for some drastic and possibly unsurvivable climate impacts by 2050, let alone the projection framework of 2100 on the table at COP 21 in Paris this year. The video above explains the famous graph that we've been seeing for many years now. It's very, very simple and very stark. We've passed the safe limit of 350 PPMV of carbon in the atmosphere, and are now above 400, rising rapidly.

Is there a way to avert dangerous climate change at this point? That's a position taken by Aubrey Meyer and his calculations in the CBAT online tool, which uses the Contraction and Convergence structure to compute the necessary equitable reductions per capita.  The diagram below shows one scenario that tries to get the planet back onto a survivable temperature curve by means of a drastic carbon reduction strategy (click to enlarge). Check out this tool and see what it involves to keep us from going into an irreversible and runaway climate change.