Onymous Guy looks into his crystal ball and is starting to get worried

Source: CAP Reform.eu

I have found it difficult to convince people who should know better that we are going to hit the carbon ceiling much sooner than most people think. [Don't take my word for it, see for example A lower limit for future climate emissions or Electricity emissions surge by 5.5% since removal of carbon price, if you are looking for evidence of a more immediate nature.

Here in Oregon, we pride ourselves on being ahead of the curve, using a lot of green energy (mostly salmon-killing hydro), and legislating moving away from coal (our per capita carbon footprint is still 15.1 Mg CO2e per capita, still much higher than the world average).

I spent the day yesterday in Salem at Willamette University's Clean Power Forum, where the head of the state Global Warming Commission and others spoke to mostly students and a few faculty like me. I was whelmed and underwhelmed, not overwhelmed.

Near the end, I said that I didn't think much of Oregon's climate targets, because they were so unambitious, that Secretary of State Kerry had said over a year ago that we needed to de-carbonize the economy by 2030, and what was being discussed (50% reduction by 2040) didn't look anything like that.

Source: The Guardian

There is an inadequate sense of urgency in these people - and these are activists and supporters!

A look into my crystal ball predicts that we have until 2031, perhaps 2035 before we hit the world-wide carbon ceiling, that warming in the El Nino cycles of the '30s will be so devastating that some rogue nation will start pumping SO₂ into the atmosphere, and we will see the Paris accords start to unravel.

 I am not in a state of panic, nor despair, but...

[By an odd twist of fate, Salem was filled with smoke from nearby field burning - I am guessing that the Air Quality Index was in the upper 200s].

UPDATE: Maybe the geo-engineers will strike sooner, rather than later.