What level of carbon-output do AGW proponents think we should be forced to return to?

Question

In terms of year - - 1990 levels? 1980? 1880? 1800?

Answer 1

Cutting down that much (like Dana wants) when our population is growing calls for depopulation.  That would mean intentionally having people die of diseases, starvation, genocides, etc.  Xenoestrogens are also an effective way of curbing population growth and they are now showing up in plastics (when they weren't in old plastics).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenoestroge...

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/...  

Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs.

—John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal

Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental.

—Dave Forman, Founder of Earth First!

I suspect that eradicating smallpox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems.

—John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal

Cannibalism is a “radical but realistic solution to the problem of overpopulation.

—Lyall Watson, The Financial Times, 15 July 1999

To feed a starving child is to exacerbate the world population problem.

—Lamont Cole

The collective needs of non-human species must take precedence over the needs and desires of humans.

—Dr. Reed F. Noss, The Wildlands Project

Answer 2

80% decrease in CO2 emissions below 2000 levels by the year 2050.

Answer 3

It's a question of phased reductions.  The first target should be to stop CO2 from getting over something like 450-500ppm.  That should keep global warming effects down to where we can cope with them.  Then we can start to reduce it back to it's natural maximum (in the last few hundred thousand years) of 300ppm.

Somewhere along this path we'll have developed an energy infrastructure that will make burning fossil fuels for energy (as opposed to using them to produce materials) a rare thing, in any event.

This is all doable without destroying anybodies way of life.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/worl...

http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/ar4-wg3.h...

The same cannot be said, if we do nothing to reduce global warming.

http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNe...

http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/ar4-wg2.h...

Answer 4

Since our contribution of CO2 is less than 1% of the total green-house gases present in our atmosphere, we don’t have to cut our emissions at all. In fact we can increase our contributions without any effects on the global climate.