The common view is that 2 degrees gives a 50/50 chance of runaway global warming - a bit like playing Russian Rulette with a two chamber gun and with your grandchild the potential victim.
biffvernon wrote:The common view is that 2 degrees gives a 50/50 chance of runaway global warming - a bit like playing Russian Rulette with a two chamber gun and with your grandchild the potential victim.
That's ok. Not having had any children, I'm unlikely to have grandchildren. Actually it's probably not ok, as not many of the politicians who decided that will be around in 2050 to face the consequences
A paper in Nature last April suggested that to give us only a 25% change of exceeding 2C warming, a 1 in 4 chance of going over 2C, we need to limit CO2 emissions to 1 trillion tonnes between 2000 and 2049. That's going to be tough given than during 2000-2006 we emitted 234 billion tonnes!
We're lucky at the moment as we're in a period of low solar activity which is supposed to last for the next 30 years. Mind you, we've still had temperatures at near record levels in Europe already this year. So, is Global Warming stronger than the sun's cyclic influence?