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Carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations in the atmosphere now stand at 385 parts per million (ppm), 67% above the average of the past 800,000 years, and 29% above the maximum of the same period.
The rate of increase of CO2 is 2.2 ppm/year and getting faster.
When atmospheric CO2 was above 450 ppm in the earth's history, the planet was completely ice-free, and sea level was 75 meters higher than today.
The safe upper limit of atmospheric CO2 that we should aim to stay below is probably between 300-350 ppm. We have already overshot it and the longer we stay above that the more likely we will have set in motion long-term climate changes that will proceed beyond human control through powerful geophysical positive feedback mechanisms.
Sudden warmings of a few degrees in the past have triggered mass extinctions. Current species extinction rate is estimated at 100 to 1000 times the average extinction rates in the evolutionary time scale of planet Earth. A mass extinction is underway and we have to reverse course quickly enough to prevent the worst.

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“Earth Day” dumped, "Triage Day" declared

Wed, 04/22/2009 - 17:25 — maggie_zhou

Here is a great dark humor about Earth Day, by ClimateProgress blogger Joe Romm:
http://climateprogress.org/2009/04/19/renameearth-day-humor-triage-i-tol...

My comments to him is below:

Joe,

Great dark humor! I like "Triage Day".

But I disagree fundamentally with your assertion that we could somehow focus on saving the soon-to-be 9 billion human population. The fact is that the larger the human population, the more important the integrity of the rest of the ecosystems is in sustaining our very survival. To put it in other words, for a small human population, we may be able to scrape a living on a devastated planet with small niches of ecosystems left, but with 9 bln to sustain, we need mostly intact, functioning ecosystems. The scary thing is that, it is well known that ecosystem diversity (i.e., the complexity of the eco-web) is directly associated with its robustness, and determines the residence time of both energy and biomass (including carbon) passing through the biosphere. AND, loss of ecosystem diversity is, just like climate responses, a non-linear process, and entire ecosystem collapses can happen abruptly when stressed to a breaking point. A great book with discussion on this is "The Rainbow and the Worm - the physics of organisms", by biophysicist Mae-wan Ho. See chapter 4 p.58, chapter 6 p. 80.

Tim R. commented above that, in the long run "Earth will some day again be in balance and humans will be here". Not necessarily. James Hansen and co-authors pointed out that, unlike runaway snowball Earth condition, for which there is a natural mechanism with with Earth will eventually escape out of (which it did in the past), a runaway global warming, once beyond a certain point, will be forever, and there is no planetary mechanism that we know of that will naturally bring an end to it. Venus is apparently in that state.

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