A thing called the U.S. Climate Change Technology Program Strategic Plan has been released (thanks to commenters at RC for the link). It seems (of course, I haven’t read the whole thing…) to be a set of options for reducing CO2 emissions. All very splendid. But what is missing is… *why* would you want to reduce CO2? Of course, we all know the answer – climate change, but (presumably for politicial reasons) they can’t say that or give any details.
The document appears to be an exercise in dancing around the point: Although scientific understanding of climate change continues to evolve, the potential ramifications of increasing accumulations of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the Earth’s atmosphere have heightened attention on anthropogenic sources of GHG emissions (1) is about as close as we get.
It does say this is because of the UNFCCC and avoiding dangerous levels of CO2, but then goes on to say the Plan makes no judgments as to what constitutes a dangerous level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (2). If this is really true, then why bother to do anything, since you don’t judge BAU levels to be dangerous?
Ch 3, p27 goes as far as reproducing the IPCC’s radiative forcing graph (see, I skimmed that far…) but if there is anything there associating that with temperature change I missed it.