So to bottom line this, how on Earth can we get back below the tipping level of 350 ppm before hitting the point of no return?

We have to give it the very best effort we can – and “we” means the generations alive to today. The ethics are clear.  The morality compelling. We must accept the hard fact that we must make very significant changes in our way of life to aim for <350 within a century – and know that most of us alive today will not see that realized. That will be for the next generations who are depending on us to set things right.

Sadly, however, we know that it was not simply scientific evidence alone that convinced people to stop smoking. “Second-hand smoke” – the evidence that showed one’s active smoking was another’s passive smoking led to the “social tipping point.”  While there is not much one can do if you can’t beat your addiction, there is plenty society can do if your behavior risks harm to someone else. The ban on smoking in public places, along with taxes on tobacco, effectively reduced levels of smoking to ensure better public health.

CO2 emissions since the 1850’s, and the alarming increase in emissions after we knew better, threaten first and foremost those who had little or nothing to do with generating carbon emissions. When the Andes glaciers disappear, perhaps in as little as 25 years, there will be no fresh water for millions of people. In less than fifty years sea-level rise will swallow the island nations of Tuvalu, Kiribati, Samoa and others. Ten of millions of people will become refugees when Bangladesh floods. Millions of species of life will be pushed off the planet.

As Kiribati President Anote Tong said recently, “Climate change is not an issue of economic development; it's an issue of human survival.”

All of these lives are victims of “second-hand CO2.”  Passive emitters. Fairness, equity, usufruct and generational ethics and plain common sense are at the heart of the issue of climate change as part of the larger Earth systems change. Therefore, as with smoking, a ban on coal in the global commons is perfectly legitimate.

We have done it before: let be an available source for a potentially civilization-ending cataclysm. MAD – Mutually Assured Destruction – became the principle that removed the apparently imminent threat of a nuclear holocaust. Simple logic makes the analogy to the use of coal that emits CO2 into the global commons.

Unless, as Vaclav Havel said to the Tällberg Forum in 2006, we can rein in our arrogance to each other and to nature, we are lost. The future course of <350 rests in harnessing this ethical understanding and both foresee and forestall the untimely demise of humankind.

Perhaps the most beautifully profound statement of our common condition was spoken by an Inuit elder from Greenland, the frontline of climate change:

“The glaciers will not stop melting until the ice melts from around our hearts.”