yes, yes, yes .. these are things that need to happen. Essentially we must work towards inserting ourselves into the carbon cycle stably as opposed to continuing to inject a few hundred million years of sequestered fixed carbon into the atmosphere. And yes, we could presumably re-sequesture carbon. Under all of the IPCC scenarios, the effects of what we have already done will continue for centuries.
So, given our limited resources, it seems a significant but not excessive incentive for efficiency (a carbon tax), migration towards insertion into the carbon cycle "green energy", a certainly a fair bit of reforestation (for many reasons) are good and important things to do.
But, it seems to me, that the actual diversion of capital to amend things is a fools folly if we accept that capital is limiting. Capital, it seems, should focus on innovation to mitigate the consequences of what we have done, as oppose throwing excessive resources at trying to stop and reverse things. This notion is based on the idea that an awful lot of people are going to come and go before anything resembling stability can come from the efforts we make today (lets just say 1000 years).
If one country or even a collection of countries seeks a Kyotoesque cap and trade, and if the consequences of that are as I would expect (a massive diversion of resources towards innovation in reducing the carbon foot-print) then folks in the year 3000 will be pleased as punch we did so.
As I think the general trend will be towards insertion into the carbon cycle (the fossils will increasingly be less economically desirable), this transition will occur at some point regardless of the intervention of a Kyotoesque effort and other such efforts.
I believe though, that for the next 1000 years, one will get more bang for their buck mitigating and adapting to climate change than they would trying to muscle up at the base of an ongoing avalanche in hopes of cutting down on the number of rocks. This assumes limited capital.
So yes, plant some trees, move to sustainable energy, and if economics permit, go ahead and durably sink some carbon.
But, the last paragraph from the IPCC 2007 seems pretty clear and generally closes out everything I have read on this subject:
"Both past and future anthropogenic carbon dioxide
emissions will continue to contribute to warming and
sea level rise for more than a millennium, due to the
time scales required for removal of this gas from the
atmosphere."
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