7 Pillars of Climate Change Wisdom

1. Human activities have produced atmospheric greenhouse gas levels that considerably transcend the natural concentrations of the last several million years. In particular, the CO2 concentration has risen from about 270 ppm in the year 1750 to about 380 ppm today.

2. If "business as usual" continues, the world could heat up by about 5°C till 2100. This is roughly the natural temperature difference between an ice age and a warm stage of our planet.Thus humanity would create anunprecedented "fire age".

3. As a consequence, global sea level would rise by 30-50 m in the long run, and the oceans would turn sour through an average pH value drop from 8.2 to 7.7.

4. In addition, unabated climate change could flip a number of "tipping elements" in the planetary machinery (like the Amazon rainforest, El Nino, or the Indian monsoon) into a different state and trigger, in the worst case, a "runaway greenhouse dynamics" through positive feedbacks and teleconnections.

5. There is a good chance to avoid such dangerous climate change if the anthropogenic warming is limited to 2 °C, which means - above all - that atmospheric CO2 concentrations must be confined to values below 450 ppm.

6. This, in turn, requires to reduce industrial greenhouse gas emissions by about 1% per annum throughout this century. Recent socioeconomic analyses, taking technological and industrial innovation into full account, indicate that a reduction would delay global welfare growth till 2100 by just three months.

7. The confinement of global warming to 2°C and the adaptation to the residual, significant impacts nevertheless asks for a re-invention of modern society that especially defines urbanity and rurality in novel ways.

Source: http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/research/
climate/downloads/pillars-wisdom.pdf