Rajendra Pachauri, chair of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, called for a target of 350 ppm CO2, down from today’s level of 387 ppm. Is this possible?
Apparently not.
From Irreversible climate change due to carbon dioxide emissions, from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:
Fig. 1 illustrates how the concentrations of carbon dioxide would be expected to fall off through the coming millennium if manmade emissions were to cease immediately following an illustrative future rate of emission increase of 2% per year [comparable to observations over the past decade] up to peak concentrations of 450, 550, 650, 750, 850, or 1,200 ppmv; similar results were obtained across a range of EMICs [Earth system Models of Intermediate Complexity] that were assessed in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report. This is not intended to be a realistic scenario but rather to represent a test case whose purpose is to probe physical climate system changes. A more gradual reduction of carbon dioxide emission (as is more likely), or a faster or slower adopted rate of emissions in the growth period, would lead to long-term behavior qualitatively similar to that illustrated in Fig. 1. The example of a sudden cessation of emissions provides an upper bound to how much reversibility is possible, if, for example, unexpectedly damaging climate changes were to be observed.
