Climate Change: Why aren't more people concerned about it?

If CO2 lingers in the atmosphere for centuries, what would it take to cause atmospheric CO2 levels to decline? How much would we need to reduce anthropogenic CO2 emissions to reverse the current trend? Would we need to reduce current emissions by 50%? 90%? How long would it take for A-CO2 to start falling?

I'm not asking for an in-depth explanation. Just a ball park figure.

What I'm wondering about is whether or not dramatic reductions in emissions would result in lowered A-CO2 levels in our lifetimes.

The earth has "greened" (plant life including trees increasingly encroaching into previous low habitable areas) 12% over the satellite Era. Any legitamate study of deforestation should account for this, increased urban human planted greenery, and tree farms etc in there calculation of forest loss. Not saying it totally makes up for the alleged forest loss cited by Ed above, but it does significantly reduce his dire numbers. Additionally, this hundreds of years of CO2 atmospheric residence time is a bunch of hooey. Recent studies show residence time in the 5-7 year range.

Emissions reduction involves the reduction of 1st world luxury.

We have the population bomb with its projections of mass starvation

In other words, it isn't an analysis at all, just a reaction to a perceived threat now, and ignoring the later, much larger threat.

hey rick,
you're singing a tired song...

...why not post up some citations.... or are my suspicions correct?

you got nothing

We currently live in an “icehouse” — a climate in which large continental ice sheets exist, in this case at both poles. The onset of this icehouse began in Antarctica 34 million years ago and in the Arctic about 2 million years ago. The latter stages of human evolution occurred in this bipolar icehouse, and human civilization unfolded during the relatively stable, most recent interglacial phase of this icehouse (the glacial times are popularly known as ice ages). This particular climate state, however, represents only a fraction of 1 percent of Earth’s history. Thus, humans evolved during, and are adapted to, an atypical climate state.


But although we technically live in an icehouse, we may be embarking on a one-way voyage into a permanently deglaciated greenhouse. To grasp what may be in store for the planet, we can look at the “deep-time” geologic record, which archives a nearly-billion-year-long record of several icehouses. Each of these icehouse periods was associated with abrupt climate change over a range of timescales, and each provides insight into the climatically fickle transitions from icehouse to greenhouse states.