Ditch the 2 °C warming goal
Average global temperature is not a good indicator of planetary health. Track a range of vital signs instead, urge David G. Victor and Charles F. Kennel.
For nearly a decade, international diplomacy has focused on stopping global warming at 2 °C above pre-industrial levels. This goal — bold and easy to grasp — has been accepted uncritically and has proved influential.
The emissions-mitigation report of the Fifth Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is framed to address this aim, as is nearly every policy plan to reduce carbon emissions — from California’s to that of the European Union (EU). This month, diplomatic talks will resume to prepare an agreement ahead of a major climate summit in Paris in 2015; again, a 2 °C warming limit is the focus.
Bold simplicity must now face reality. Politically and scientifically, the 2 °C goal is wrong-headed. Politically, it has allowed some governments to pretend that they are taking serious action to mitigate global warming, when in reality they have achieved almost nothing. Scientifically, there are better ways to measure the stress that humans are placing on the climate system than the growth of average global surface temperature — which has stalled since 1998 and is poorly coupled to entities that governments and companies can control directly.
Failure to set scientifically meaningful goals makes it hard for scientists and politicians to explain how big investments in climate protection will deliver tangible results. Some of the backlash from ‘denialists’ is partly rooted in policy-makers’ obsession with global temperatures that do not actually move in lockstep with the real dangers of climate change. New goals are needed. It is time to track an array of planetary vital signs — such as changes in the ocean heat content — that are better rooted in the scientific understanding of climate drivers and risks. Targets must also be set in terms of the many individual gases emitted by human activities and policies to mitigate those emissions.
OWN GOAL
Actionable goals have proved difficult to articulate from the beginning of climate-policy efforts. The 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) expressed the aim as preventing “dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system”. Efforts to clarify the meaning of ‘dangerous’ here have proved fruitless because science offers many different answers depending on which part of the climate system is under scrutiny, and each country has a different perspective.
The 2009 and 2010 UNFCCC Conference of the Parties meetings, in Copenhagen and Cancun respectively, reframed the policy goal in more concrete terms: average global temperature. There was little scientific basis for the 2 °C figure that was adopted, but it offered a simple focal point and was familiar from earlier discussions, including those by the IPCC, EU and Group of 8 (G8) industrial countries. At the time, the 2 °C goal sounded bold and perhaps feasible.
…
Because it sounds firm and concerns future warming, the 2 °C target has allowed politicians to pretend that they are organizing for action when, in fact, most have done little. Pretending that they are chasing this
unattainable goal has also allowed governments to ignore the need for massive adaptation to climate change.
Second, the 2 °C goal is impractical. It is related only probabilistically to emissions and policies, so it does not tell particular governments and people what to do. In other areas of international politics, goals
have had a big effect when they have been translated into concrete, achievable actions.
Full article here (PDF) sent with press release: 2degreesC_Comment_Victor
UPDATE: Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. writes in comments:
Finally some sense is making it into these journals on the 2C threshold issue. I discussed this on my weblog several years ago also in my post
where I concluded with
“The use of the global annual-averaged surface temperature trends [should be] relegated to where it deserves to be – an historical relic.”
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I always had the feeling it did not have anything to do with temperatures rising, CO2, extreme weather, or anything else, except to stop the exploration, extraction and burning of fossil fuels, because that is business of companies the Left Wing has regarded as evil-incarnate at heart of a capitalist empire, even back in the 1970’s before CAGW ever existing in their mindset.
(Despite the endless “green advertising: of the fossil fuel companies for the last 10 years.)
Any plan for the world that does not give them this result, (and complete control of all natural resources and all industrial activity) will not be acceptable.
The climate con-artists are so bold that their victims are gullible, hyponotized, stupid and pliable that they admit that the 2.0oC goal was not scientific. And they know that the climate obsessed media and politicians are so on board that they will not ask any tough questions.
This report demonstrates that once again skeptics were correct all along: 2.0oC was a scam of climate hypesters.
I believe it’s been called a hoax?
Sounds about right.
Typical Ponzi scheme.
Moving the goal posts to maintain the scheme going.
Like moving from Global Warming to Climate Change – something not falsifiable since Climate Change always happens.
So what we should expect from this is that they will be replacing something falsifiable (2ºC) with another non falsifiable measurement.
Expect next item to be something that can only be “measured” by Models.
The Nature link to this open article is here:
http://www.nature.com/news/climate-policy-ditch-the-2-c-warming-goal-1.16018
After reading through it completely, it is clear the authors simply want make pCO2 the goal, rather than any changes, real or imagined, that result from CO2 increases.
More observations on the false claims they assert:
Where they write, ” The oceans are taking up 93% of the extra energy being added to the climate system, which is stoking sea-level rise and other climate impacts.”
It is obvious that if they could name the “and other climate impacts” they would have, i.e. it’s a straw man argument. Even their “stoking sea-level rise” claim is an obtuse wording to avoid saying a demonstrable falsehood such as “sea-level rise accelerationalse” which would be the observable prediction if OHC were indeed growing.
Authors of this article are a way behind times: “in reality they [governments] have achieved almost nothing”. Definitely untrue: global temperatures have not been rising for 18 years. Paradoxically, hot air is the best way to stop global warming.
The good: The 2 degrees global warming threat is ignored (at least, I’ll bet) until we get some 21st century warming).
The bad: According to the article, the best indicator of “climate change risk” is the atmospheric concentrations of CO2 and other greenhouse gases.
The absurd: the important metric is CO2 ppm regardless of warming, cooling or anything else.
This is an opinion piece that proposes to abandon testable, observable predictions from physical science and replace them arbitrary CO2 goals is absolute rubbish. It was written by a *professor of international relations.
Obviously, editorial staff at Nature have abandoned any pretense of supporting science, and replaced it with political correctness.
*The corresponding author and first author is David G. Victor, professor of international relations at the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California, USA.
In this area Nature long ago give up supporting science has it should be done and went full tilt for ‘science’ as it is done by those whose faith in AGW is never reduced by the facts seen in reality .
Resulting in the type of general damage to science ‘the cause’ has created in the manner public sees it, that we all may up regretting.
Did any of you read the article in the link?…..
They are essentially saying that since temps have not changed…there needs to be a different metric for measuring the damages done by CO2….to the climate!
Again…CO2 changes the climate without changing the temp
Just reading between the lines, I just cannot fathom the stupidity of supposably intelligent human beings that honestly believe that us mere mortals can control global temperature and or climate.
There are five new data gathering attachments which NASA has added, one of which is called…wait for it…
ECOSTRESS
“We are excited to expand the use of the International Space Station to make critical Earth observations that will help scientists understand the diversity of forests and vegetation and their response to a changing climate,” said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “These innovative Earth Venture Instruments will join a growing suite of NASA Earth-observing sensors to be deployed to the station starting this year.”
I have been listening to this stuff for over 30 years from the previous generation. And apparently I am the only one who lays awake at night wondering why the UN Sustainability/Agenda 21 goals look like the Hippy movement. How can this be a coincidence? Which came first?
We need to control you lives and since it’s become clear worldwide temperature change won’t justify it, we’ll come up with some vague impossible to easily disprove standards to justify our control.
Facists at work.
Yup. And calculate a planetary sickness index using an undisclosed, ever changing algorithm, to be disseminated widely and re-calculated frequently in a retrospective manner. It would be best to set up a separate UN agency which could be charged with this task, but before that a binding international treaty is needed, based on said index.
Not that the planet is a living being, in spite of the lovely metaphor invented by Lovelock, so it does not have a single “vital sign”, not to mention a whole array of them, but that should not deter policy going ahead, should it?
We could name it “The Pandora’s Box Index”. And you can bet that carbon dioxide was the key.
Alternatively, it could be “The Prometheus Index” because CO2 is a product of fire, and the gods never intended us to use fire.
Here’s the graphic Nature designed to go with this Opinion piece.
http://www.nature.com/polopoly_fs/7.20139.1411992443!/image/Climate1.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_630/Climate1.jpg
Judge for yourself what they think.
Hypochondriacs with premium insurance plans
Still, I’m gonna miss those two degrees, if they fall by the wayside. It was such a clear cut issue and image, the message was simple and stark:
“Abide by the two degrees, or we’ll give you the third degree.”
Simple Question: If we are not worried about Global Warming anymore, then what dangerous Climate Change are we worrying about? Why is rising Ocean Heat Content dangerous if it does not lead to even 2 degrees of Global Temperature change?
They are getting silly. It is time to just start laughing at them.
Isn’t this just the wimpy mensheviks taking over briefly from the loopy bolsheviks?
Just disband the klimatariat. Nobody can forecast the weather or the climate more than a few days out, and even that knowledge is scrappy. Climate indicators have value, and people like Walker and Mantua have not worked in vain. But the kids have been running the climate science kitchen for decades and there won’t be much improvement till they are chased out by adults.
But good luck with finding adults.
Since we’ve now had eighteen (18) years of no significant warming, extreme weather events are now attributable to global warming (that we haven’t had).
Got that?
It’s a new and very special branch of logic.
Brilliant strategy!
With the whole “model temperature prediction” thing going in the dumper it makes sense to go insurgent and break this thing down into tiny parts so that if one is being argued against you have ten or fifty other things to point to.
I was wondering what these guys were going to do.
I love that graphic: “2 degrees. That’s the amount the planet will be allowed to warm.” The sheer hubris of that statement is breathtaking.
Mr. mosomo, on the subject of finding adults. You guys are like dogs, You chewed up one bone pretty well. So the masters are throwing you a new bone to chew on. And oh boy are you chewing.
This egg is sooo unboiled, it still raw. 2 degrees C and they’ve been trying for 30 years to hatch this thing. Its enough to drive some deniers to want to surrender to the Chinese Communists to get away from these crazy fruitcakes with their co2 fetish. The ocean is big and it drives the so go ahead and figure out how to control the ocean, may I suggest they start with the tide and later work on controlling the subsurface currents when they sufficiently manup. For my part I will continue to burn wood to defeat cold.
…it drives the atmosphere so…
They should ditch the 2.0C and go after the Ocean Heat Content temperature measures.
As in we have to keep temperatures in the 0-2000 metre Ocean below a 0.2C rise. Its only at 0.075C now.
http://data.nodc.noaa.gov/woa/DATA_ANALYSIS/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/DATA/basin/3month_mt/T-dC-w0-2000m4-6.dat
We know that the ocean is absorbing 90% of the heat and it has gotten to +0.075C already !!!
Bill, according to the link that you provided , the temperature anomaly for the northern hemisphere is approx. 6 x that for the southern hemisphere . Do NOAA provide an explanation ? Is it due to the excess heat content being contained in deep currents that are more constricted in the NH.?
Reblogged this on Centinel2012 and commented:
It always was a made up number even Mr. M said that … lol Good to see they finally admitted it!
2 Oct: Australian: Graham Lloyd: Scientists scotch ‘tenuous’ 2C climate goal
THE 16-year pause in global average surface temperature rise made the scientific case to limit climate change to 2C “tenuous”, a widely promoted article in Nature says.
As a result, a new set of indicators or “vital signs” was needed to gauge the stresses that humans were placing on the climate system, joint authors David Victor and Charles Kennel from University of California said.
The suggested new measures include the level of CO2 in the atmosphere, ocean heat content and high latitude temperatures.
The Nature article confronts head-on the dilemma of the pause in global surface temperatures that climate scientists have long argued did not exist…
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/health-science/scientists-scotch-tenuous-2c-climate-goal/story-e6frg8y6-1227076982880
2 Oct: Guardian: Adam Vaughan: Could the 2C climate target be completely wrong?
The global warming goal that nearly 200 governments have agreed on should be ditched, say scientists writing in Nature
In a nondescript conference centre five years ago, as temperatures fell to freezing outside in the streets of Copenhagen and protesters gathered, world leaders did something remarkable: they put a limit on how high temperatures should be allowed to rise as man-made global warming takes hold…
Under the headline, “Ditch the 2C warming goal”, they argue the 2C limit is “politically and scientifically … wrong-headed”, it is “effectively unachievable” and it has let politicians off the hook, allowing them to “pretend that they are organising for action when, in fact, most have done little.”
David G Victor, the University of California professor who co-wrote the comment along with former Nasa associate administrator Charles F Kennel, said he felt compelled to speak out after watching climate diplomacy efforts and working on the latest blockbuster report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change…
Michael Jacobs, a special adviser to Gordon Brown when he attended Copenhagen and now an adviser to the recent New Climate Economy report, says the timing of the intervention is far from helpful…
“15 months out from the Paris conference and a week after a successful summit put climate change back on the international agenda is completely the wrong time to consider abandoning that commitment.”
Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Angela Merkel’s climate adviser: “This will create a little storm I guess. Many lobbyists will celebrate tonight because this provocation will of course try to stop the momentum which was building up last week in New York. For the first time since Copenhagen, people feel a new movement emerging towards a meaningful agreement in Paris and such a piece can serve as an excuse for inaction again. It somehow conveys the message the science is unclear. All in all, it’s a provocation at a critical point in time,” he said…
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/oct/01/2c-climate-change-target-global-warming-nature-paper
The first symptom of a failed theory is the unwavering denial that it’s failing in defiance of the data. The second is moving the goalposts in the hope that a compromise will somehow keep the theory alive and gravy train running.