The Environmental and Conservation Issues Room
So the 1.5 degrees and DOOM meme was political, not scientific.
1.5 Degrees Was Never the End of the World
How hot is too hot for planet Earth? For years, there’s been a consensus in the climate movement: no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. The figure comes from the Paris Agreement, a climate treaty ratified in 2016, and world leaders such as President Joe Biden bring it up all the time: “If we’re going to win this fight, every major emitter nation needs [to] align with the 1.5 degrees,” he said in November. Youth activists at the Sunrise Movement call 1.5 degrees a “critical threshold.” Even the corporate world is stuck on 1.5 degrees. Companies including Apple, Google, and Saudi Aramco—the world’s largest oil company—claim to be transitioning their operations in alignment with the 1.5 goal.
But here’s the thing: 1.5 degrees, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, isn’t based on any scientific calculation. It doesn’t represent a specific planetary threshold or ecological tipping point. It was first proposed during international climate negotiations as a moral statement, a rebuke of the idea that the world could accept some disruption and suffering in order to burn fossil fuels just a bit longer. That’s the takeaway of a new study on the history of the target from two French academics, Béatrice Cointe from the Centre for the Sociology of Innovation and Hélène Guillemot from the Centre Alexandre Koyré, both funded by the French National Centre for Scientific Research. From the perspective of the present, it’s a relief that 1.5 degrees doesn’t represent a scientific threshold, because we are almost certainly going to blow past it. As a rebuke, however, it may live on.
[Read: The 1.5-degree goal is all but dead]
Nothing about the 1.5-degree target was inevitable. For decades, the number on the lips of most climate negotiators was 2 degrees Celsius, or about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. And you do still hear that number as the go-to target in some climate circles. But in the late 2000s, a negotiating bloc called the the Alliance of Small Island States argued that this was simply too much warming for their vulnerable nations. Their atolls would be overtopped by the sea; their coastal cities would flood. So they called for a lower target, and 1.5 seemed like a reasonable half-step down from 2 degrees.
From there, 1.5 degrees gained momentum in diplomatic back channels and in conversations within think tanks, NGOs, and a group called the Climate Vulnerable Forum. But there was at that time very little science on the target; scientists were busy modeling higher levels of warming, which they considered more likely. A 2015 scientific panel hosted by the UN concluded that although the science on 1.5 was “less robust,” “efforts should be made to” set warming targets as low as possible. That year, after what Cointe and Guillemot characterize as “intense and difficult negotiations,” the new target was folded into the Paris Agreement, which calls for “pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, recognizing that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change.”
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Staying below 1.5 degrees, the IPCC scientists concluded, would be an extremely heavy lift that would require, among other things, slashing emissions about 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030. This is the origin of the common idea that we have “12 years left” to stop climate change. The IPCC puts out lots of reports, but its report on 1.5 degrees remains its undisputed chart-topping banger. You can feel its influence in this speech that Greta Thunberg gave to the U.K.’s houses of Parliament in 2019: “Around the year 2030,” she said, “10 years 252 days and 10 hours away from now, we will be in a position where we set off an irreversible chain reaction beyond human control, that will most likely lead to the end of our civilization as we know it.”
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Originally Posted by countryboy
