To build a geothermal or a solar thermal power plant costs $3,000 to generate over one year 8,300 kwhs. It costs $1,000 to build the same capacity coal fired plant. The running costs of renewables is 1 cent per kwh while the running costs of coal are 2 cents per kwh. At current costs it takes 24 years for renewables to save enough to pay the extra capital cost or renewables.

As the running costs of coal are likely to be higher in the future because coal will become more costly and there will be a carbon tax it makes economic sense to start to build renewable energy plants today and to ban the building of new coal, oil, and gas fired power stations immediately and to start to phase out existing fossil fuel burning power plants.

That is, we can reduce our greenhouses gas generation within a short time without dire economic consequences if we want to.

with a time frame as given here, it becomes obvious that no new technology will evolve to miraculously let us carry on in the way society is converting energy resources to CO2 at the moment.
Why is it that no investigation has been published into what Society consideres "Core Requirements" to maintain functional living standards for its members and what can be considered private and optional life-style improvements.
Tourism is the most obvious un-essential occupation, and should be assessed to the contribution it makes the global warming.
Professional Sport is another. I know it would be unthinkable with the present public mentality to do away with Cricket or Football or Golf, but if you have to give up some priviledges to the Social Subsistance what else would make such a huge difference and where would you start?

The acceleration factors already exist as do the decelation factors.

To ascribe apocalypse to a particular number which seems to have escaped most other climate change researchers is a little rich considering that world temperatures have exceeded this many times in the past.

We do not need a bogie man to see the need for change.

As farmers have to adapt, otherwise with no rain they are run off by the banks, so the city people also have to change.

The biggest problem now, however, with the cities, is the growing corporate culture now thriving mostly on the older colonial terminology of quarry economics or pitstock politics, Western Australia a typical or even grand example.

With such going on, even Howard was caught up in the phrase - we are having it so good, do not let Climate Change prevent us from having it?

Which could mean, we are so damned confident we can eventually fix it, that we don't need to be in a hurry to get going on it - bit like just moving the deck chairs on the Titanic.

As I am going on 87, with my wife now dead, why in hell should I worry, but I am concerned that my 14 great grandkids might not soon enough get the message?

Cheers - BB, WA.

The world has undergone devastating change many times in the past.

That doesn't mean yet another devastating change is nothing for the human race to worry about. Especially not if we have it in our power to avert it.

If there were a fat asteroid that appeared to be on a collision course, would we say, "oh, it might miss, and even if it doesn't, it's happened before"?

No. We would regard it with the same apprehension as we regard heavily-armed, sabre-rattling neigbours.

Eight years isn't a number that has been often bandied about before but the 2-degree-warming threshold has been for a long time. Past that point, and the warming becomes a "runaway" positive feedback, up to a limit that would see a large and permanent change to climate in every region of the world.

I would expect humanity to survive that. But many individual humans wouldn't, and many other species would cease to exist. It would be a disaster for the world and its population alike.

Why does it seem that all solutions are set against the parameter of maintaining our current standard of living? Isn't that the problem in the first place?