"It's worse than we thought." Sound familiar?

[GliderGuider]

114. So we keep growing, we just nibble at the edges a bit?

Your #4 sounds like BAU for everything except energy, with the addition of some "birth control for brown people". Neither of which is enough to make any real difference in the next two or three decades, when all the action is going to happen.

It's basically an admission that either there isn't a serious problem (since it's not scaled to be a serious solution); or if there is a serious problem we can't deal with it anyway, so let's just do some easy stuff to make everyone feel better until TSHTF. I actually think it's the second (can't deal with it, so let's do a bit of easy stuff), and that's probably exactly what we're going to do.

So you may be accurately calling the actual path we'll take, while waffling on the outcome.

I keep wondering what might be coming in the IPCC fifth report that's going to scare the wits out of everyone. I'd bet real money it has to do with tipping points and timelines.