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http://act.350.org/letter/reje...

Studies conducted in greenhouses have found that plants can photosynthesis up to 40% faster when concentrations of CO2 are between 475 and 600ppm.

That's nice. That's not sustainable, though. It's quite irrelevant what the plants will do under those conditions if we're well and rightly fucked before we even get there. It's also not universal. Some plants can do that. Some plants can't; they are already at or near their limits.

Since someone will bring it up, might as well be me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Worth a look, the percentage of electricity production in the US by renewables is indeed at an all time high, but not as much as you'd think.

In 1998, it was 11.06% of all electricity produced. In 2015 it was 13.44% of all electricity produced.

Yes, an increase, but it has been mostly Wind and Solar picking up for the loss of hydro. Hydro is down 28% since 1998, while Wind and Solar are up massively.

Overall, the US produced 150 billion KWh more electricity in 2015 than in 1998. Nice, but in real terms, nothing to jump up and down about.

CO2 levels in the air are past 400 PPM, in order to get them to stop climbing and actually FALL, will require efforts far beyond all this in a timeframe that is highly unlikely to happen.

http://400.350.org/

The safe level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is 350 parts per million. The only way to get there is to immediately transition the global economy away from fossil fuels and into into renewable energy, energy efficiency, and sustainable farming practices.

The primary problem with this is that what would be required to do it may well start WWIII and lead to massive revolts worldwide. The math just isn't there.

In many ways, the time to change direction was 30 years ago. The ship has sailed, so we now must prepare for the future that is so clearly coming.

http://www.globalwarming.org/2...

But as Newsweekreporter Sharon Begley points out, just to limit atmospheric concentrations to 450 ppm, nations would have to build 10,000 new nuclear power plantsâ"one every other day from now until 2050â"plus a mind boggling 1 million solar roof top panels per day from now until 2050. Even then, 450 ppm is attainable only if global energy efficiency improves by a whopping 500%, population grows only to 9 billion (instead of 10 billion or 11 billion), and global GDP grows at an anemic (near recession) rate of 1.6% per year.

The problem with people like the 350.org group is that they encourage action without saying how MUCH of that action would be required.

What would it take to lower CO2 concentrations to 350 ppm? According to Begleyâ(TM)s source, Cal Tech chemist Nathan Lewis, global CO2 emissions would have to drop to zero by 2050.

Absent revolutionary changes in energy production, distribution, conversion, and storageâ"Nobel-caliber breakthroughs that nobody can plan or predictâ"lowering CO2 emissions to 350 ppm is impossible without draconian cutbacks in population, economic output, or both. Whether they realize it or not, the Climate 350 Club is asking us to go back to the caves.

In other words, there is ZERO chance of this happening...

So we need to prepare for a world of 500 PPM CO2, and frankly should prepare for 600 PPM, since 500 PPM will sail right on by and I doubt we'll stop before 600 PPM either...

We'll still have to deal with phasing out fossil fuels when they run out, so why not start earlier ? The cost will be less.

Of course, I have no problems with starting now.

The question is, how hard do we push for it?

To keep CO2 below 500 PPM would require massive and dramatic changes, that would likely crush the world economy and put us into recession. It is possible that we couldn't avoid 500 PPM no matter what we do, because of the existing CO2 and existing emissions, but if we could, it would require that we more or less turn off all our coal plants tomorrow, half our cars, half our natural gas, etc.

Since we aren't going to do that, we're going to pass 500 PPM.

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Let me put it this way. We can slowly move towards a fossil free world, with perhaps a 100 year plan to get there. But we also have to accept that a 100 year plan takes too long to stop the CO2 rise from going through the roof.

In other words, the ship is going to sink, she's made of iron, fill her with water and she'll drop to the bottom of the ocean. Are we going to ignore that fact, or start ripping up the decks to build lifeboats?

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http://400.350.org/

It all sounds very scary when you read stuff like that sight. Clearly they are a propaganda site, but I accept that they also might be right, or right enough.

But what they DON'T do is explain what it would take, what it would ACTUALLY take, to get CO2 back down to 350 PPM. Why? Because if they did, everyone would promptly ignore them.

http://www.globalwarming.org/2...

That is 7 years old, but it is even more true today than when it was published.

"Absent revolutionary changes in energy production, distribution, conversion, and storageâ"Nobel-caliber breakthroughs that nobody can plan or predictâ"lowering CO2 emissions to 350 ppm is impossible without draconian cutbacks in population, economic output, or both. Whether they realize it or not, the Climate 350 Club is asking us to go back to the caves."

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http://sustainabilityadvantage...

This is an example of what happens when someone attempts to put it into an actual plan for action. First, there are a ton of flaws with that plan and some outright errors. #8 for example assumes that 67% of power is lost in transmission. No it isn't, the real number is about 7%.

It just isn't going to happen, it is the sort of list you come up with when someone is daydreaming about "if I could magically just change the world, what would I do?"

Yeah, that's the problem with AGW.....to actually do something substantial (get CO2 down to 350 ppm, for example) we need to take drastic measures.

Think about the changes we would need to make to society in order to begin removing CO2 from the atmosphere. Building a few solar plants (or even putting solar panels on everyone's roof) is not enough.

The whole website 350.org was created what now... 6 years ago? Because Bill McKibben said that 350 ppm CO2 was a "safe upper limit" for CO2 in the atmosphere in 2007.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/350.org
http://350.org/

Since we are now well past 350ppm CO2 in the atmosphere: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/

The IP-Cry-Wolf organization has to create a "new" upper limit. It's just more bullshit. They have no idea what any "safe upper limit" for CO2 is, they guess and publicize scary numbers every 5 years in order to secure future funding.

And the magnitude of the seasonal oscillation demonstrates how powerful this uptake of carbon by plants is in relation to the 400ppm of CO2. Recovering a significant amount of the carbon uptake from seasonal plant growth and sequestering it into soil (thereby improving soil fertility), as can be accomplished with Biochar processing, is one of the very few technologies that could be employed to bring Earth back to the relatively safe levels of 350ppm that climate scientists have recommended as a goal. See http://venearth.com/ , http://www.biochar-international.org/ and http://350.org/ for relevant information.

Oh and just for good measure, this:

http://act.350.org/signup/reckoning/?akid=2086.624457.CWuv92&rd=1&t=2

Here's the analogy. We're all on a ship in the ocean. Engineering below has alerted the captain that we're definitely headed for an iceberg. The rich people who are partying on the ship don't want the party to stop.

Since they're the Big Money on board and have the Big Connections , they have outsized say in what the captain decides to do. They shout down the engineers, accusing them of being jealous of the first class passengers.

The rest of the passengers are worried but unable to get captain to change course.

After a while, engineering gets more and more agitated and the passengers can see the panic in their faces. The first class passengers become more even recalcitrant and adamant because now it's a matter of pride.

The rest of the passengers start quietly meeting amongst themselves, talking in low voices, moving about the ship in small groups.

You guess how this movie finishes.

OK times up. It finishes with a lot of well heeled people floating lifelessly in the frigid waters as the ship veers safely past the iceberg with the passengers on board, safe and going home to their loved ones.

No one is going to let deniers crash this ship and kill everyone on board. There comes a time when no one cares what your "rights" are or if SCOTUS has decided that money is speech or even what fucking SCOTUS says. Civilization at its core isn't based on "civil rights" or "free speech" or SCOTUS decisions. We got by without any of that shit for a few, ten thousand years. It's based on survival. Anyone who threatens survival will find themselves outside of the laws of civilization pretty fucking fast.

The Constitution is not a suicide pact. If you make people fight for their survival, if you're identified as one of the deniers who drove civilization to the brink of extinction you can pretty well plan on dying a pretty fucking barbaric death, possibly involving blow torches and such like medieval -level implements of torture . It's nothing I'd wish on anyone, but moderate, peace loving, live and let live liberal bunny people like me aren't going to be able to hold back revenge seekers very well. Prominent personalities deeply involved with denialism may want to take pause here.

My colleagues think we should spare you from the full horror of what's going to happen when, say, the food web in the ocean begins to collapse. They think that because they think by building bridges we can eventually bring you along, but if we paint the full picture of what the future will bring to your flesh, you'll fucking tighten up, become defensive and go full off into denialand and "stand your ground" until the bitter end.

I have another perspective. I think by explicitly laying out for you likely or possible scenarios and what part you'll play in them your brain will start to work in favor of your own survival despite your pansified, airy-fairy post-modernist "you have your experts and I have mine, you have your reality and I have mine" bullshit you learned from cocksucking FoxNews.

Don't think your money or guns or survivalist skills are going to count for jack fucking shit when the world's intelligence agencies collectively decide that you're a clear and present danger to humanity and bring to the party everything in their labs and the kitchen sink to make sure that your dealt with. That's how this is going to go down in the end because you know what? The Constitution is not a suicide pact.

Any ideas on what we're going to do about the massive unemployment, starvation, and misery that will result from not making changes?

The general idea is that with economic growth, we will be more able to handle those problems in the future than we are now, and this is especially true of developing economies, many of which are currently experiencing rapid growth.

The alternative, assuming we want to go back to the 'safe' level of 350ppm CO2, means we need to cut CO2 emissions so much that we are actually reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. This means switching to nuclear, everyone giving up their cars and going electric, and planting lots trees. We don't have much time to do this.

Now, ignoring the capital outlays required to switch from coal to nuclear immediately, can you imagine the economic impact of requiring everyone to switch to electric cars? Even in the US, most people aren't going to afford that. A $27,000 car is more than a lot of people make. And if you consider the world median income, $27k is as much as they will make in 10 years.

Given all the difficulty, it's not surprising that politicians make no more than token efforts at reducing CO2, for example, the Kyoto agreement.

Here is my report on our action. http://www.350.org/en/oct10/reports/25953 As you can see, the effort is an analogy rather than a direct climate effort. We cleaned up a government groomed trail to make the point that is it government action which will be needed to tackle climate.

Also, http://www.350.org/en has 7347 events in 188 countries going on today. Probably the largest climate action effort ever.

You can't tax CO2 emissions accurately if you can't quantify the damage caused by CO2. So far I haven't seen a single estimate of the damage caused by CO2 that's more than speculation.

Do you need to accurately quantify it?

We're all pretty well aware CO2 is too concentrated in the atmosphere already, and we should be aiming to get back under 350ppm (see http://www.350.org/mission for a _really_ brief overview).

Why not just aim a tax roughly at getting back to 350ppm?