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Hi all, Sir John Beddington is chief scientific adviser to the UK govt, and Dr Jane Lubchenco is Under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere and is now heading NOAA. So their piece in NYT is important, politically [1]. Ocean acidification is generally recognised as one of the greatest hazards of rising CO2 levels, though one sees little about this in the media or journals. Ocean acidification may be most dangerous in the Arctic, and the problem is worsened by methane release, as bacteria in seawater convert much of the methane to CO2. Does anybody have a feel for how important this is? At the CaCC conference last weekend [2], I suggested that we might need to get CO2 below 350 ppm by 2030 to be on the safe side. But that's just my guess, from what little I've managed to read. Is 2030 well before the danger point, or, on the other hand, might 2030 prove to be too late? Lubchenco herself gives a talk suggesting that acidification will be serious by the end of the century [3], but is this forecast like the IPCC sea ice forecast in 2007, suggesting the sea ice would last beyond the end of century [4]? I am afraid that many long range forecasts have been shown to be absurdly optimistic after only a few years! There is an optimism bias in human nature, but some scientists take this to an absurd degree. A quick google search threw up this to support my 2030 date [5]. Assuming 2030 is our target, then we definitely need geoengineering to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, and I suggest a combination of agro and chemical means, e.g. combining biochar with rock crushing. If we can take as much carbon out as we put in, then we can have a world carbon neutral economy - possibly in ten years. After that we could bring down the CO2 level. How to pay? Get the oil and gas extraction industry to pay for the pollution that their product will cause! It's simple and logical. Have a carbon tax, ramped up over 10 years to produce carbon neutrality, then some further time to bring the CO2 level down to an acceptable level. Taxing at source makes the tax simple to collect and enforce. We'd also have a chance to keep global warming below 2 degrees. Of course, we also need to save the Arctic sea ice, but for that we need a different kind of geoengineering, known as Solar Radiation Management, to cool the Arctic [6]. This was the pamphlet I distributed at the conference, pus the 8 references [7], all explained in the AMEG session on Saturday [2]. These could be simple messages for Rio, but would anybody listen to reason? Cheers, John [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/19/opinion/acid-test-for-oceans-and-marine-life.html?_r=2 [2] http://www.campaigncc.org/altsummit [3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuttOKcTPQs [4] http://www.ualberta.ca/~eec/Stroeve2007.pdf [5] http://earthsky.org/earth/ocean-acidity-studies-raise-more-yellow-flags [6] http://ameg.me/ [7] http://ameg.me/index.php/31-cacc