Later Word: Eyes Wide Shut, Careening Towards the Tipping Point

Several news outlets zeroed in on another statement from the IPIC report.  The LA Times story is an excellent example.  Their headline: Experts set threshold for climate-change calamity: Researchers say an emissions tipping point for the planet may be 25 years away:

The world's leading climate scientists have for the first time established a limit on the amount of greenhouse gases that can be released before the Earth reaches a tipping point and predicted that it will be surpassed within decades unless swift action is taken to curb the current pace of emissions.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated that once a total of 1 trillion tons of carbon dioxide are emitted into atmosphere, the planet will exceed 3.6 degrees of warming, the internationally agreed-upon threshold to the worst effects of climate change.

"We've burned through half that amount" since preindustrial times, Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University who reviewed the report and is a co-author of the panel's upcoming report on the effect of climate change, said in an interview. "Because the rates of emissions are growing, it looks like we could burn through the other half in the next 25 years" under one of the more dire scenarios outlined in the report.

Under the least dire scenario, that limit could be reached by the end of this century.

Calling climate change "the greatest challenge of our time," panel co-chair Thomas Stocker said humankind's fate in the next 100 years "depends crucially on how much carbon dioxide will be emitted in the future."

But this is the tipping point for utter catastrophe, for thousands of years.  As other statements in the report affirm (noted in the Early Word below), effects from greenhouse gases already emitted will continue, and continue to get worse in the coming decades.  Attacking the causes now may save the far future, while humanity is simultaneously dealing with the ongoing effects of past pollution.