There is a growing view that the ambitious climate goal of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement – keeping the rise in the global temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius – is, as a practical matter, unattainable. Much of the official world of global warming clings to 1.5, as demonstrated at the COP 27 climate conference in Egypt late last year, but that position looks untenable to many qualified outsiders.
In November, with COP 27 as a backdrop, Scientific American observed, “The 1.5 C threshold is swiftly approaching. The world has already warmed by about 1.3 C, and studies suggest temperatures could cross 1.5 C within a decade.” The article notes, “That opens up a thorny debate about when, exactly, it’s appropriate to declare the target dead—and what happens next.”
The University of Hamburg’s recent “Hamburg Climate Futures Outlook ‘23” was undertaken to “systematically assess the plausibility of a climate future in which the Paris Agreement temperature goals are attained, namely holding global warming to well below 2°C and, if possible, to 1.5°C, relative to pre-industrial levels.” The project involved over 50 academics, examining “social drivers of decarbonization” and “physical properties” necessary to achieve “deep decarbonization by 2050” in order to meet the 1.5 degree goal.
The results found, “None of the ten social drivers support deep decarbonization by 2050,” a repeat of findings in a similar endeavor in 2021. Social drivers are things such as U.N. initiatives, “climate-related regulation,” “protests and social movements,” and “fossil fuel divestment.”
The six physical processes include things such as “polar ice-sheet melt, Arctic sea-ice decline, and regional climate change and variability.” Those three “barely influence global mean temperature and thus do not affect the plausibility of attaining the Paris Agreement temperature goals.” The other three – “permafrost thaw, AMOC [Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation—Ed.] instability, and Amazon Forest dieback” – “can moderately affect the global mean temperature, thus moderately inhibit the plausibility of attaining the Paris Agreement temperature goals.”
“Meeting the 1.5°C Paris Agreement temperature goal is not plausible, but limiting the global temperature rise to well below 2°C can become plausible if ambition, implementation, and knowledge gaps are closed.”
The Hamburg project concludes, “Meeting the 1.5°C Paris Agreement temperature goal is not plausible, but limiting the global temperature rise to well below 2°C can become plausible if ambition, implementation, and knowledge gaps are closed.”
In a statement reported in Washington’s The Hill, University of Hamburg’s Anita Engels said, “It is time for scientists to focus on the question of what is not just theoretically possible, but also plausible, that is, can realistically be expected.”
There’s the rub. It isn’t clear how to accomplish those tasks, or if there is an effective mechanism to overcome the implementation hurdles. It seems clear to many that the international political mechanism, led by the U.N., to deal with global warming over the past 27 years from COP1 in Berlin in 1995 to COP27 in Egypt last year, including the failed 1997 Kyoto Protocol, isn’t workable.
The model of the successful 1987 Montreal Protocol, which the world adopted for the climate issue, isn’t appropriate. Montreal dealt with a discrete problem, with a single cause, and a readily-available solution. None of those conditions apply to controlling the global temperature.
In a recent Foreign Affairs article, Jason Bodorff of Columbia University and Meghan L. Sullivan of Harvard’s Kennedy School, write, “The clean energy transition demands a complete transformation of the global economy and will require roughly $100 trillion in additional capital spending over the next three decades. There is little reason to expect that such a radical overhaul can be completed in a coordinated, well-managed, and smooth way. An orderly transition would be hard enough if there were a master planner designing the highly interconnected global energy system—and, needless to say, there is not.”
Perhaps the best advice comes from the University of Colorado’s Roger Pielke Jr., a pragmatist when it comes to steering the global climate, and, as a result reviled and trolled by climate change zealots. He advises practical, on the ground, local responses rather than grandiose, politically impossible international hand-waving. His advice: be prepared.
In his 2018 book “The Rightful Place of Science: Disasters & Climate Change,” Pielke writes, “The only politically and practically feasible way to slow this increase, let alone stabilize or even reverse it, is to improve societal preparedness. When floods devastated the Netherlands in 1953, the nation came together to devise institutions, policies, and projects that would prevent such a catastrophe from happening again. Back then no one worried about whether climate change contributed to the disaster; much of the nation was already built below sea level. Proven policy tools for reducing disaster vulnerability include public education, better (and better enforced) building codes and land-use practices, improved infrastructure, sensible insurance programs, enhanced warning, emergency planning and response capabilities, and so on. By deploying such tools, many places in the world, including poor countries, have made great progress on reducing their vulnerability to disasters.”
–Kennedy Maize
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