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A group of climatologists say that greenhouse gas emissions will have to be eliminated completely in order to stabilize the earth's climate and prevent temperatures from rising. Current efforts/plans to just stabilize emissions will not be enough.

Damon Matthews, from Concordia University in Canada, and Ken Caldeira, from the Carnegie Institution for Science, Stanford, USA, used a global climate model to study how greenhouse emissions would need to change in order to stabilize global temperatures over the next few hundred years. Previous studies have only looked at what happens when emissions are stabilised, according to the report in NewScientist.

So far industrial emissions total around 450 billion tonnes. "Even if we eliminated carbon dioxide today we are still committed to a global temperature rise of around 0.8 degrees Celsius lasting at least 500 years," says Caldeira.

Roger Pielke, a climate policy expert at the University of Colorado in Boulder, agrees with the findings. "This research makes the case that simply stabilising concentrations is insufficient to stabilize temperatures. Their argument, if widely accepted, raises the bar on what it means to mitigate climate change," he says.

The group says that current emissions targets for 2050 are not enough to avoid substantial future warming and that eliminating emissions or actively removing CO2 from the atmosphere is the only way to go.

"It is technologically challenging, but not impossible. The biggest challenge will be to get political consensus," says Caldeira.

You see, it always finds a way back to politics.