2-degree global warming limit is called a 'prescription for disaster'

Acccording to Scientific American, at a news conference during the American Geophysical Union meeting, James Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, declared that the two-degree target for global temperature rise "is a prescription for disaster." Eelco Rohling, professor of ocean and climate change at University of Southampton in the U.K, added: "If governments keep going the way they are going, the planet will reach an ice-free state." The paleoclimate record shows that 560 parts per million would be enough to melt all the ice in the Arctic, and later the Antarctic. "If the world waits until 2020 to begin, it will need to reduce CO2 by 15 percent a year to reach 350 ppm. We are out of time."