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Experts: Aim of 2 Degrees Climate Goal Insufficient

Posted by samzenpus on from the keeping-it-cool dept.

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."

3 of 442 comments (clear)

  1. Let's see by Crashmarik · · Score: 0, Troll

    Wasn't it supposed to raising 2 degrees/decade yy now ?

    Aren't the poles supposed to be ice free by now ?

    Isn't Florida supposed to be underwater ?

    Isn't the entire east coast supposed to be rubble from super hurricanes ?

    Dustbowls that would make the 1930s look like nothing ?

    Really enough of the chicken little.

    1. Re:Let's see by ColdWetDog · · Score: 0, Troll

      Drains flowing backwards and docks disappearing under high tide is the fault of increasing local population??

      Have you seen who is moving into Florida? Those land whales are heavy. It's not so much that water levels are rising, it is that the land mass is sinking due to all that extra weight.

      Those Double Cheeseburger / Extra Fries / Monster drink calories have to go somewhere.

      --
      Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
  2. Meaningless goal by Milharis · · Score: 0, Troll

    I don't understand how a scientist can a talk about a "2 degrees goal", that's such a stupid metric.
    There's so much we don't know about the climate, and so much momentum that it's just meaningless.
    What happens when we reach that 2 degrees? Well probably nothing. And even if we all of the sudden say "Stop everything, we're at 2 degrees!" and somehow manage to do it, it's not going to stop because we want it to just like that. It's not a static system.

    We don't know (precisely) the impact of an increase in temperature on the system, we don't know the model of the system except that it is complex and we don't know how it's going to evolve, and yet we fix an arbitrary value that we have no way to keep as a goal?