[asa]

There is a new thread in RealClimate.org today. It begins ...

There is a climate splash in Nature this week, including a cover
showing a tera-tonne weight, presumably meant to be made of carbon
(could it be graphite?), dangling by a thread over the planet, and
containing two new articles (1 and 2), a News & Views piece written by
two of us, and a couple of commentaries urging us to “prepare to adapt
to at least 4° C” and to think about what the worst case scenario (at
1000 ppm CO2) might look like.

At the heart of it are the two papers which calculate the odds of
exceeding a predefined threshold of 2°C as a function of CO2
emissions. Both find that the most directly relevant quantity is the
total amount of CO2 ultimately released, rather than a target
atmospheric CO2 concentration or emission rate. This is an extremely
useful result, giving us a clear statement of how our policy goals
should be framed. We have a total emission quota; if we keep going
now, we will have to cut back more quickly later.

Good reading. There is opportunity to post comments on it (easy to do
with no login or "membership" required).

jb

-- 
Burgy
www.burgy.50megs.com
To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.