Target Levels of CO2
Contributions to climate change, whether they cool or warm the Earth, are often described in terms of the radiative forcing or imbalance they introduce to the planet's energy budget. Now and in the future, anthropogenic carbon dioxide is believed to be the major component of this forcing, and the contribution of other components is often quantified in terms of "parts-per-million CO2-equivalent" (ppm CO2e), or the increment/decrement in carbon dioxide concentrations which would create a radiative forcing of the same magnitude.
At present, non-CO2 contributions to climate change, positive and negative, are believed to roughly cancel out, so that the net radiative forcing being experienced at present, expressed in ppm CO2-e, is more or less the same as the actual current level of carbon dioxide (393 ppm CO2, as of April 2011). To some extent this legitimates the statement of targets just in terms of ppm CO2, as is usually the case. However, the positive and negative non-CO2 will not necessarily balance in future, and so a target stated in terms of CO2e is less ambiguous.
Read more about this topic: Climate Change Mitigation Scenarios
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