Experts: Aim of 2 Degrees Climate Goal Insufficient

An anonymous reader points out that a long held goal of keeping the Earth's average temperature from rising above 2 degrees Celsius might not be good enough. "A long-held benchmark for limiting global warming is 'utterly inadequate,' a leading U.N. climate scientist declared. Keeping the Earth's average temperature from rising past 2 degrees Celsius – a cap established by studies in the early 1970s – is far too loose a goal, Petra Tschakert, a professor at Penn State University and a lead author of an assessment report for the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, said in a commentary published in the journal Climate Change Responses. Already, with an average increase of just 0.8 degrees Celsius, she wrote, 'negative impacts' are 'widespread across the globe.' Tschakert called for lowering the warming target to 1.5 degrees Celsius."

Comments

Social scientists

[phantomfive]

This beautiful quote from the paper gives the point of view of feminist social scientists (the term "feminist social scientists" comes from the paper):

Less well known perhaps is a critique from feminist social scientists who interrogate what may be deemed ‘acceptable’ and what may be ‘dangerous’, and for whom, and who contest the global community as a homogeneous entity. Joni Seager, for instance, demonstrates how notions of acceptability always mirror ‘a prism of privilege, power, and geography’ [14]. She argues that those for whom a 2C target [are] politicians and economists from the global North deeply entrenched in a masculinized rationality that nature can be controlled and that in the imminent climate race with inevitable winners and losers they will be among the former. Seager rejects the notion of a 2C target as a real geophysical threshold that neatly distinguishes between little and much danger

That is worth a read for educational purposes alone.

Re:Let's see

[Crashmarik]

I live in Florida, and that has nothing to do with rising sea levels but rising population levels.
Hint: More paving = More drainage in a rainy climate.

Climate never STOPS changing

[argStyopa]

Of COURSE it isn't sufficient.

When - ever - has an activist said "yeah, well, what's being done is pretty much good, yeah. I'm happy. I guess I don't have much to be upset about any more"?

Here's a hint: if there's one thing I can guarantee the climate won't do, is be static.

Re:Complete article

[MightyMartian]

Are you trying for the Logical Fallacy of the Year Award here? The point of AGW theory is that the changes we are seeing are not natural in origin. Instead of playing semantics, deal with what the theory states. Invoking private definitions is probably the lowest form of debate, because it's useless and accomplishes nothing.

An even bigger question

[turkeyfish]

is whether we can figure out a way to avoid it as we go about destroying it through lack of knowledge about biology and planetary science on the part of the average citizen.

Yet at a time, we need even more scientists, republicans are slashing funds for education at all levels from pre-K on the Mississippi Delta to graduate study at the world's most prestigious universities. However, people shouldn't look to the media to educate themselves. After all, whats the point, if you've just enrolled in the School of Hard Knocks.