This seems about as addle brained as most of the mainstream stuff on CO2 emissions reduction, but it may provide a point to start useful discussions. Also, having been presented to the UN, it is presumably getting more attention internationally than the humble ramblings of posters to these threads
:
http://www.climatecentral.org/news/co2-emissions-2-degrees-target-17744A draft of the report, called the “Deep Decarbonization Pathways Project,” was delivered to the United Nations on Tuesday. It was developed by researchers working in the 15 countries that have the highest CO2 emissions and shows how each of those countries could rapidly reduce its emissions by 2050.
International negotiators looking to strike a climate deal have agreed to try to limit warming to 2°C. And scientists have outlined how much more carbon we can emit to likely keep warming below 2°C, calling it a carbon budget. It’s just like a household budget except going over it could increase the likelihood of major sea level rise, an increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme heat events, and a rapid decline in Arctic sea ice.
I don't want to post the whole article here, but there is much to criticize. Rather than doing all that myself here right away, I though others might like to have at it, first.
What do you see as the weaknesses (and strengths, if you find any) of this report?
Here's the link to the executive summary for the main report:
http://unsdsn.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/DDPP_interim_2014_executive_summary.pdfETA: Here's at least one passage that seems...realistic:
The IPCC AR5 Working Group 3 (WG3) calculates that in the absence of additional commitments to reduce GHG emissions, the world is on a trajectory to an increase in global mean temperature of 3.7°C to 4.8°C compared to pre-industrial levels. When accounting for full climate uncertainty, this range extends from 2.5°C to 7.8°C by the end of the century.
When even as conservative and toned down a group as IPCC is talking about basically 8 degrees C rise by 2100, you know we are truly in deep, deep trouble.
Here's the largish pdf for the full report (218 pages):
http://unsdsn.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/DDPP_interim_2014_report.pdfETA again: on page 34, they have a nice little formula:
CO2 emissions = Population x (GDP/Population) x (Energy/GDP) x (CO2/Energy)
It is the first and last of the element on the right side of the equation that are most talked about. Some insiders do talk about the 'carbon intensity' of the economy. But really it should be blindingly obvious that the only one of these elements that can be changed essentially instantly is the second--GDP/Population. Since it has become clear that increasing this number does not necessarily increase happiness, this clearly is where we should be making the most and fastest changes, with some care to do so in ways that do the least substantial harm. But instead they take as assumed a 'rising trajectory' of GDP/Population, since as the economist (that many of these experts seem to be), increasing the GDP/Population ration is
the highest of all conceivable values in the universe...