Key quote-within-a-quote from article at … And Then There’s Physics:
If the expected negative emissions cannot ultimately be achieved, the decades in which society had allowed itself a slower, softer transition would turn out to be a dangerous delay of much-needed rapid emission reductions. Saddled with a fossil fuel-dependent energy infrastructure, society would face a much more abrupt and disruptive transition than the one it had sought to avoid. Having exceeded its available carbon budget, and unable to compensate with negative emissions, it could also face more severe climate change impacts than it had prepared for.
I went to some Departmental talks recently and discovered that some of my colleagues are researchering possible carbon sequestration technologies. This could be very important, but appealing to negative emission technologies is often quite strongly criticised. The basic argument (which has some merit) is that providing this as a possibility can provide policy makers with an argument for delaying action that might reduce emissions sooner.
Although I have some sympathy with these criticisms, I do have some issues with them. One is that it often involves criticising climate models that include negative emission pathways. The problem I have with this is that they seem to use “climate model” as a catch all for any kind of model associated with climate change. However, there are a large number of different models. Some are trying to understand how our climate responds to changes, and – typically – use concentration pathways. Others try…
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ecoquant
667 per centimeter : climate science, quantitative biology, statistics, and energy policy 
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