You Ought to Have a Look is a feature from the Center for the Study of Science posted by Patrick J. Michaels and Paul C. (“Chip”) Knappenberger. While this section will feature all of the areas of interest that we are emphasizing, the prominence of the climate issue is driving a tremendous amount of web traffic. Here we post a few of the best in recent days, along with our color commentary.
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Some folks are just slow to get it.
There is no way on God’s greening earth that international negotiators are going to achieve the emissions reductions that climate models tell them are necessary to keep the rise in the planet’s average surface temperature to less than 2°C above the pre‐industrial value.
At the United Nations climate meeting held in Cancun back in 2012, after kicking around the idea for several years, negotiators foolishly adopted 2°C as the level associated with a “dangerous interference” with the climate system—what everyone agreed to try to avoid way back in 1992 under the Rio Treaty.
Bad idea—it won’t happen. Even the folks at the U.N. are starting to realize it.
According to an article in this week’s The Guardian titled “Paris Climate Summit: Missing Global Warming Target ‘Would Not Be Aailure’”:
EU climate chief and UN’s top climate official both play down expectations that international climate talk pledges will help hit 2C target… “2C is an objective,” Miguel Arias Canete, the EU climate chief, said. “If we have an ongoing process you can not say it is a failure if the mitigation commitments do not reach 2C.”
…In Brussels, meanwhile, the UN top climate official, Christiana Figueres, was similarly downplaying expectations, telling reporters the pledges made in the run‐up to the Paris meeting later this year will “not get us onto the 2°C pathway”.
There’s so much backpeddling and spinning going on, that you’re motion sick reading the article. While we certainly did see this coming, we didn’t expect the admissions were going to start at this early date.