The atmosphere at 4-degrees above the present

Much like a mountain climber suffering from altitude sickness, the world needs to urgently come down from its current CO2 level of 389 ppm, to at least 350 ppm but likely to 320 ppm, before it is too late. Only the deepest cuts in emission accompanied with emergency draw-down of atmospheric CO2 through fast-track reforestation, biochar and chemical sequestration, have a chance of mitigating runaway climate change.

Feeble attempts by civilization to mitigate the climate are drowning in a tide of medieval conspiracy theories by man-over-nature ideologues (Hoggan, 2009; Hamilton, 2010). There is nowhere the 6.5 billion of contemporary humans can go, not even the barren planets into the exploration on which space agencies are pouring more funding than governments allocate for environmental mitigation to date. Nor would the discovery of Martian bacteria compensate for the loss of the rainforests and coral reefs.

Figure 1
Land (NASA/GISS) and ocean (NOAA) mean annual temperature anomalies for the period 2000-2009 relative to 1951-1980. Anomalies smoothed over 250 km. Note: (1) warming by up to 4 degrees Celsius over parts of the Arctic and west Antarctica; (2) warming of continental mid-latitude dry zones, including central Australia, by about 2 degrees C; (3) warming of large parts of ocean surfaces by up to 1.0 degrees C. Grey areas have no data. http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/maps/ 

Figure 2
The relations between atmospheric CO2-equivalent (including the radiative forcing of methane) and mean global temperature, according to Charney’s climate sensitivity parameter of 3 +/- 1.5 degrees C per doubling of CO2 (Hansen et al., 2007, 2008) (IPCC-2007). The red crosses represent recent CO2-temperature relations based on CO2-alkenone (resistant organic compounds contained in phytoplankton) proxy (Pagani et al., 2010). The Red circle represents estimates of climate sensitivity as a function of longer term vegetation and ice sheet changes (Lunt et al. 2010).