Climate Change: Parallel Pursuit of Near-Term and Long-Term Climate Mitigation

Science Magazine

Climate Change:

Parallel Pursuit of Near-Term and Long-Term Climate Mitigation

Stacy C. Jackson

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Energy and Resources Group, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.

E-mail: stacyjackson@berkeley.edu

It is well accepted that reduction of carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions is the lynchpin of any long-term climate stabilization strategy, because of the long lifetime of CO₂ in the atmosphere (1). However, a focus on CO₂ may prove ineffective in the near term without comparable attention to pollutants with shorter lifetimes (2).

A growing body of evidence suggests that significant climate changes are no longer a distant prospect and that time spans on the order of decades are increasingly relevant (3). Observations over the past decade indicate that the climate is changing more quickly than projected by earlier Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Reports (4, 5), that climate impacts occur at lower surface temperatures than previously estimated (6), and that temperature changes will be greater during this century than had been previously projected (7). These fasterthan-expected changes are occurring in the context of evidence of abrupt decadal change in the paleoclimate record (8), an evolving but incomplete understanding of "tipping points" and irreversible "points of no return" (9, 10), .........