What is Necessary to Prevent Dangerous Climate Change?
When politicians look at the need to address climate change, they often ask the question: What is politically feasible?
Yesterday at a Copenhagen climate conference side event sponsored by the Bellona Foundation, I raised a different question: What is necessary?
What kind of cuts in emissions are needed to stop the most dangerous effects of climate change? And, importantly, how do we achieve them?
While negotiations go on as if the world has another 40 or so years left to solve these problems, nature is telling us that we’re already close to departing the relatively narrow range of temperatures in which human civilization developed.
We are already outpacing the worst-case scenarios for temperature and ice melting that were laid out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change just two years ago.
Can we really afford for the temperature to rise much higher?
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