The Ghost of James Hansen's Alternative Scenario

With the need to keep climate change simple enough for the average person, the focus has been on CO2. However, considering the need for immediate reductions in emissions and that methane will cause 25 times more warming than CO2 over a 100 years means that we can reduce the atmospheric concentration of methane more quickly than CO2. Including methane reductions as a core short-term climate action strategy yields quick results whereas CO2 reductions take 100 years before it is removed from the atmosphere assuming natural means of carbon removal. Here is a great article from New Scientist by Kirk Smith at UC Berkeley

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227146.000-methane-controls-before-risky-geoengineering-please.html

And here is James Hansen's amazing work "The Alternative Scenario."

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/97/18/9875


CO2 seems to be easier to beat but we need to throw all we have at this problem. Assuming a 450 ppm CO2 peak concentration, focusing on non-CO2 GHG's become of critical importance as we should really be reducing our CO2 concentrations to 350 ppm from the 383 ppm they are at now.