re: #3 watching you tiny alien kittens are

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To put it bluntly there is no way we are stopping at 2 degrees rise, less than 16 years just isn’t enough time to change the way we power the planet. If all the nations did it on a crisis emergency footing and at hideous expense, maybe, but that is just not going to happen. The public at large just does not believe or understand the threat, much less understand tipping points.

Hopefully as the negative effects become more pronounced and verifiable we will be able to convince the public at large of the necessity of change. Maybe we will still be able to arrest the increase at a slighter higher number if too many tipping points are not fully realized. It doesn’t look good though with methane release from the oceans and permafrost already occurring.

It’s sad, but with all the monied interests in fossil fuels actively working against the acceptance of AGW we cannot convince enough people to demand change soon enough. The orientation towards short term profits and willful blindness are built into our system of business and without unified public pressure will not change. Stopping warming at the 2 degree target is realistically a hopeless cause at this point. Let us all hope that our planet is forgiving enough or that we are smart enough to allow us to survive our own stupidity with civilization still somewhat intact.

It’s not just “monied interests” and it’s not just in the U.S. China is a very important player here, with a great many coal fired plants going, many more under construction, and a relatively inefficient infrastructure that means a lot of coal must be burned to get a KWH to the user.

Any sufficient response to the problem will require large scale adjustments by all the major players: US, China, Europe, India.

That all these will agree to bear the costs of converting to the green tech that’s available now, at today’s price, is not in the cards. Not unless or until the damage everybody’s taking is so severe that the need for action is inescapable. Unfortunately, at that point, we might not have the economic leeway to build all that. So many people’s lives would be endangered short term that it would take a ruthless triage to free up the funds from saving their lives, so as to save the life of civilization itself. Even communist countries have a hard time with that kind of triage.

I don’t see any way out except to improve the economics of wind/solar/nuclear/efficiency. Every improvement tips the balance in our favor. Enough improvement, and the use of coal can be abandoned without incurring any daunting penalty. Enough more, and we can even back off using natural gas. A bit more, and we can manufacture our motor vehicle fuel in a carbon-neutral fashion.

Along with these improvements, we’ll have to clear away the regulatory underbrush. Power lines from sunny deserts or windy steppes, to energy-hungry cities, will have to cross national grasslands etc. without NIMBY vetoes. That sort of thing.

Economic and technical advances can be put into effect everywhere. We won’t have any trouble persuading China or India to come on board. They’ll do it because it saves money.

Ramp up R&D efforts. Keep building stuff, because if you build it, you’ll learn how to build it so that when it’s time to go to scale, you’ll be ready. And keep on explaining the danger. Sadly, it’ll be ever easier to find instances of punishing storms and droughts and heat waves and floods that can be tied to global warming.