if we are at the brink of climate failure

I read BBC regularily. The amount of climate news provided by this service is excellent.

This is positively scary:

Carbon dioxide levels are substantially higher now than at anytime in the last 800,000 years, the latest study of ice drilled out of Antarctica confirms.

The “scary thing”, Dr Wolff added, was the rate of change now occurring in CO2 concentrations. In the core, the fastest increase seen was of the order of 30 parts per million (ppm) by volume over a period of roughly 1,000 years.

“The last 30 ppm of increase has occurred in just 17 years. We really are in the situation where we don’t have an analogue in our records,” he said.

At this rate it is not inconcievable that we are looking at climate failure (not just change) within our lifetime.