Re: “Former US Vice President Al Gore is well on his way to making his first billion dollars riding on the climate change bandwagon. Who do you think you are to get in his way?”

I wrote a short piece early last year about this very subject: Top 10 Careers in the 21st Century

Glad you enjoyed John’s piece.

I like the idea of thinking strategically, as opposed to fixating on tactics. Thinking strategically works well when the persons you advise are rational beings of good will and integrity. But search as I might, I cannot find many such persons in the leadership of the public sector of any nation.

You said “noone is seriously suggesting that we can stop climate change completely; but maybe we can stop catastrophic climate change before it’s too late.”

Since everyone that’s on the Global Warming Bandwagon uses the phase “Stop Global Warming” or “Stop/Halt Global Climate Change”, does your comment mean that they are not really serious about stopping it or that they just don’t communicate their positions very well. If as you suggest, that Global Warming is a life/death situation for the earth, then a bit more precise language might be useful for those of us who have to evaluate what you are suggesting. If you don’t really want to “Stop Global Climate Change” don’t say it.

“If the United States and the global community are going to expend billions of dollars of resources and risk the impacts of tactical solutions such as carbon offsets, carbon taxes, bio-fuels, etc., then there should be a clear, concise, compelling, measurable and desirable statement of the Future for the global climate.”

There is a clear answer to this question, and it is obvious to anyone who has bothered to actually read some of the scientific literature on climate change, or even the more educated mass-media pieces.

The current problem has been caused by excessive pollution in the form of greenhouse gases, with the worst of the bunch being CO2.

In order to attempt to reduce humanity’s impact on the global climate (noone is seriously suggesting that we can stop climate change completely; but maybe we can stop catastrophic climate change before it’s too late), we are going to need to reduce CO2 emissions (as a starter, with a serious think about methane as well).

Therefore, the first major goal (and we probably won’t have to worry about anything else if we can’t achieve it, because we’ll be too busy trying to save our hides) is to stabilize CO2 emissions at a level the planet can deal with and hence stabilize CO2 levels in the atmosphere.

Where exactly CO2 levels should be stabilized is still being debated, with many scientists believing that anything much higher than background levels for the last 1,000 years is seriously dangerous. Most calls are currently for something along the lines of this paper by Hansen et al, Columbia University (2008):

If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm.

Of course stabilizing CO2 is just the first target.

The final question is not so much:
“When will we know dangerous climate change has been stopped?”

but more like:

“What do we have to do to maintain the planet in a sustainable state for future generations?”

This is much the same as the question:
“How can we keep people and society safe?”

The answer is that this is not a one step process. Just as with law and order we need to maintain a safe society, with responsible planetary management, we will need to maintain a safe planet. And as per law and order, this is not something that will stop, it is an ongoing process that will require fine-tuning at every step.

I address this point in
The 12 Angry Men Blog.