Kenneth Sir,

great words you have given, I do not have a single word to react. Its very nice, concise, and complete answer, as some one has smartly filled a glass by accommodating whole ocean in it.

Thanks . But believe me , this has been a big question in my mind. upon traversing a R&D career of 32 years and seeing a bit of changed scenerio of climate, the only thing i am able to say that we are consistently loosing our level of adaptability, flexibility, adjust ability, patience, compromise with nature and other situations, and welcoming those climate changes. Changes are real facts of life, every moment we like and love to have change in space and time, then why we are crying for climate change and then scaring people in particular the poor socioeconomically deprived farmers and marginal and small rural land holders, who knows better then us to adjust with climate using their traditional wisdom and knowledge and rich experiences of their fathers and forefathers. But when as a scientist, policy planners, politician, leader, or in any other capacity we meet them, we always blows few common things- water is scarce, land is scarce, Co2 is hiking, life is in danger, world war will be there for water etc etc.. and with this philosophy endless high level meets, greets, conferences and budget pours at many parts of globe ...I am not at all opposing these...but only my concern remains ..lets encourage them and we too and do some thing innovative and tackle the situation with a motto ' we have to transform each and every risk into opportunity' by any means...and forget for long term plans and predictions.

Fortunately or unfortunately I use to a scientist, professor and technocrat too dealing dozens of natural catchments ( all kind of land uses , all sizes, all locations in India) . After seeing a long journey of this peculiar technological options 'integrated watershed development and management' . I some time surprise , what has happened to our so called present age scientific society or group, where most of them are busy in using secondary data of high volumes, without caring for their quality and relevance and then applying a to z simple and complex mathematical principals with intensive blends of statistics probability stochastic and using plethora of software , putting any kind of thing in it as input..which in many situations remains 'garbage' and surely yield output too in same shape, which they reshape with a good match 'observed v/s predicted'. and here is ready a good quality high repute research paper. Physics and logic of nature and its processes at regional level and at micro scale are not being visited or realized and whatever secondary data from where ever is available is sewed in models.....

Just couple of day before i use to review some of the research article of an international journal. my god , what and where we are going ...even knowing that data is only 30 to 40 % reliable , we are playing with it and yielding a model or prediction claiming it is of 85 % effective outputs...

I am sorry, Kenneth, as I could not control, and reacted in candid way..hope you and other readers here will take it in very light and positive mood. its only and only my personal view, and i always respect those quoted researchers, and consider them manifold better and inteligent than me, as I could not got ample time, opportunity and capability to write good papers, as most of mine time is spent in traversing catchments, surveying, creating gauging structures, generating hydro logic records, creating R&D and academic infrastructures and conceiving and guiding research in real ground conditions well away from 4 walls of camps, labs.

Once again thanks

14 tons of carbon per person? Wow, that's about 24 tons of new forrest per person. I could get behind that as part of the solution. 

It is important to point out that the relationship between CO2 emissions and population is changing, because per capita CO2 emissions has been changing.  Check out the report entitled "Trends in Global CO2 Emissions" by the European Commission Joint Research Centre and the PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency.

Emissions in China have increased dramatically since 2002.  China is now the world's largest CO2 emitter.  Meanwhile, emissions from the US and EU have decreased since 2000.  See Figure 2.3 of this report.

  But also, this report indicates that CO2 emissions per capita, and emissions per unit GDP, have been decreasing in most industrialized countries. Per capita emissions are increasing in some developing countries, especially China, but even here, and in India, emissions per unit GDP are actually declining.  See Figures 2.4 and 2.5 of this report.  This means that economic development in China, India, and other developing countries is following a more efficient path from the ones industrialized countries followed during the last century. 

The big question is whether ongoing and future improvements in efficiency and clean technology will be enough to overcome population growth in developing countries.   

http://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/news_docs/pbl-2013-trends-in-global-co2-emissions-2013-report-1148.pdf

Paul   stewart  and ales...thanks for nice inputs n also thanks for guiding the original question towards a valuable  and worthy  direction n destination..

Dear M L, I’m not an expert in climate change nor am I familiar with all these deep studies of IPCC (in English, GIEC in French) having lead to great decisions on world level at conferences like the recent Paris COP 21 (2015). I also read with interest the repeated arguments from a minority of scientists against alarmism in the field. But, I recognize not to be able to comment who is right and who is wrong. As a scientist, when reading the arguments or listening to reports on the TV, I have the feeling that probably both sides are partly right partly wrong. This is of course common when there is an no negligible amount of uncertainties in the models.

So I just wanted to react because I like your « positive  adaptation » point of view. Indeed, adaptation makes part of nature’s skills, although all her attempts are not always successful (a posteriori on long periods). Diversity e.g. helps cope with odd factors and events. Dinosaurs could not adapt to an unexpected catastrophic event 65 millions years ago, but they had already enjoyed millions and millions of years of prosperous existence (I use a positive vocabulary in line with your positive attitude). And their disappearance was the mammals chance, our chance ! Also, Homo Neandertanliensis disappeared about 40 000 years ago, due to severe environmental conditions, but we seemingly all have inherited 6 – 10 % from him in our DNA. And what about new possibilities offered by permafrost warming in Russia and Canada ? For agriculture and new settlements ? What about opening new traffic lines in the region of the north pole ? Even tourism is already developing in Groenland !

Moreover, as noted by Stewart Cohen CO2 emissions per unit GDP have been decreasing in most industrialized countries and even in China and India. Already nowadays.

So, adaptation to climate change is in motion. The pity is that it will take a long time - as ever on Earth - and that we probably won’t be there any more to see the definite results.

.... In the last sentence I mean of course, "we RG users", not "we humans" :=) 

yes its a great opportunity to change or fine tune our aspirations to feel a bit relaxed and applying the saved physical & mental energy in exploring new worthy prospects