Limiting climate change at a 'safe' level: what will it take?

Some degree of climate change is inevitably, actually around 0.7 degrees of globally averaged warming has already occurred. Is there a level beyond which any further climate change becomes so damaging and dangerous that we should do all we can to avoid this happening? The answer to this last question is that for any level of change there will be problems, the pathway to achieving that change is also critical, however a change of less than two degrees has emerged as a 'line in the sand'.

I am currently working on two articles.

1. Under a framework of contraction and convergence (equal carbon emissions per person) what are the per-capita emissions that are permissible in the medium to long term in order for average warming to two degrees or less?

and

2. What are the likely consequences of climate change; so far, up to 2 degrees, and beyond?

Clearly an understanding of 2 is vital for 1. During my research for 1 I carried out a lot of research that encouraged me to write an article on the second question separately, so wide ranging and important are the issues.

Hopefully the first of these articles should be on http://climatechangeaction.blogspot.com within a couple of days. RSS feed, e-mail subscription and bloglines available, stay up to date!

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