On Sat, 12 Jul 2008, John Thornton wrote:
> 450 to 500 ppm CO2e!
> Is he nuts?
I doubt he's nuts. Nicholas Stern is a careful and very intelligent man at the head of a very large analytic enterprise.
You may well right that even this will not be enough. But the point of this article is just how hard it will be get to this point. By the Stern gang's calculation, it would require global average emissions per head to be two tonnes of carbon, which is unbelievably low -- it's not just 1/10th the current American average, it's 1/2 the current Chinese average. This would, among other things, require all electricity generation and the entire transportation fleet to be carbon emission free by 2050.
It was, I thought, I pretty stark and concise statement of the problem. If you're right and he's understating it, that only adds to to the force of these calculations.
As for Carrol saying the political goals are insuperable, that was part of the point too. Wolf calls the obstacles against solving this problem "mountainous" and calls it "the greatest collective action challenge in history." If the past continues to be a good guide the future, the odds are clearly high against this succeeding.
But I guess my hopes that this article made these points with unusual clarity were misplaced. It almost sounds like you guys are talking about other articles.
Michael