When (and how do we decide) are we at a climatic point where earth system engineering becomes appropriate and necessary?

Increasingly researchers and politicians are beginning to discuss earth system engineering methods as an important option in a suite of climate adaptation and mitigation strategies. Extensive scientific research is required before the political consensus can be developed. This is not an optimistic decision, but the necessary background research would do much to make the decision informed.

What are the costs – economic, social, medical, environmental, and political – of failing to adequately respond to climate change by reducing green house gas emissions?

As the science of climate change becomes increasingly accepted, the dominant arguments against effective mitigation are that it is too costly – jobs will be lost; industries will be shut down; national economies will be disrupted. To date the main economic attacks on this seek to demonstrate that the economic costs of mitigation are relatively small.

What is lacking is a widespread realisation of JUST HOW SERIOUS the effects of climate change will be. This needs to be quantified – with scenarios and errors bounds, as climate forecasts are.

Only then can a reasonable cost benefit analysis be done of the ultimate costs of the current slovenly response to be weighed against the relatively small investment required to head off this looming catastrophe.

Surely a proper assessment of the costs would reveal we should have started dealing with this problem with great urgency a decade ago.

Given boundary conditions (e.g. budget constraints; human kind’s need for food and shelter; present state, pace and length of physical processes, etc.), what is, from an economic (but not only) point of view the right mix of mitigation/prevention and adaptation actions and policies to deal with (and cope with the consequences of) natural resource (land, water, climate, biodiversity, etc.) and sustainability problems?

Policy makers have to make real life choices which include accepting that some/most impacts of human activities on nature are unavoidable. The question is what is the most efficient way to deal with them: mitigation or adaptation, or more likely which combination of the two.

Analysis to arrive at answers will be complicated not in the least because of its interdisciplinary nature.

How can policy options best be developed to adapt human life to the worst-case scenarios of climate change?

The political or technical processes to mitigate climate change may well not succeed. Ecosystem/social science needs to define survivable adaptions for environmental services under likely climate extremes.

Late in this century, policy makers world-wide are likely to need well-founded options for the support and movement of their populations, depending upon which path of development climate change follows. Defining and evaluating potential strategies now would be a sensible precaution, one that could lead to posing many engineering and scientific questions that we can address successfully during the next decade (and beyond).

What should be the new world order if low carbon development pathway, low poverty and equal opportunity are to become equally weighted global developmental goals for this decade?

Can the slogan of think globally and act locally provide feasible solution? Perhaps time has come to rise above national boundaries and act globally to deliver climate good? Has climate change pushed the world to the edge so that it is time for us to think of minimum work agenda which rises above national boundaries and becomes global good to be delivered globally? Can global governance in climate mitigation generate global commitment for poverty reduction given that national priorities and circumstances are different and for large number countries reason for non cooperation for commitment to low carbon pathway is poverty burden and need for rapid development and income generation at the least possible cost .