I’m not standing in the way of the CPRS, but I’m convinced we have to do a hell of a lot more, and very quickly, if we are to still have a chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change.

On current trends the Arctic will be free of sea-ice in summer by about 2013. That’s one of our polar ice-caps gone missing, for part of each year.

There’s nothing we can do now to prevent that. The resulting Albedo flip will add several degrees of warming to the whole Arctic region.

I can’t see how we can allow that situation to carry on for decades and still avoid catastrophic climate change, such as the melting of Greenland’s icesheet and thawing of permafrosts. Can you?

Hansen has shown from paleo-climate records that Garnaut’s target of 450 ppm is very likely enough CO2 to eventually melt all the ice on the planet, ie an 80m sea-level rise. Hansen believes we need to return below 325 ppm to have a chance of restoring the Arctic sea-ice. Seems reasonable, given that we’ve never seen more than 300 ppm for at least 600,000 years, no?

We are now at 387ppm and IPCC models say that “strong” targets of 25-40% reduction in developed countries by 2020 would be required to stabilise below this 450ppm target. That might be doable with strong market incentives, but 450ppm means aiming for runaway warming, not a safe climate.

To restore a safe climate, we need genuine emergency action now to reduce emissions to near-zero as soon as possible and start drawing down atmospheric carbon before the positive feedbacks from the Arctic melt and other recent changes make runaway warming inevitable.

And that means that, while a market solution may be necessary, it is nowhere near sufficient to avoid catastrophe.

We don’t fight wars just by introducing taxes or market incentives! In WW2, countries devoted up to half their GDP to the war. That’s the kind of effort we need to save the planet.

Which is why I’m putting my own efforts into mobilising my part of the global community to support genuine emergency action, and to ditch this softly, softly pantomime.

Do you agree? This seems a little different to your own conclusion:

“As for me, I have new work to do. I now understand my highest purpose is to motivate large numbers of people from all walks of life to act. We all now need to personally engage, in whatever way is appropriate in our circumstances, to slow down the crash and to get our society as ready as we can for the challenges ahead. So I’m going to talk, write, guide and support people, to help them do so.”
- http://paulgilding.com/scream-crash-boom-2

This seems to be based on the idea that the “crash” will be survivable. I agree the initial social or economic shudders may be survivable – the current financial crisis is a case in point – but if we fail to prevent runaway warming, that’s game over.