Essay by Eric Worrall
Professor Mike Hulme: “… There’s going to be a lot of work done to reconstruct a narrative …”
Was the world’s most influential climate target doomed from the start?
As the world passes 1.5 degrees C of warming, a Cambridge scholar argues that putting a deadline on climate action was the wrong way to frame it.
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A pair of new studies in the journal Nature Climate Change looked at historical data and came to the conclusion that the record heat last year — the first year to surpass 1.5 degrees C — wasn’t a temporary fluke, but a sign that the world is now soaring past this influential climate target over the long term. The new year continued that upward trajectory. Even as a natural cooling pattern called La Niña took hold recently, January managed to be hotter than ever, clocking in at a record 1.75 degrees C warmer than the preindustrial average.
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… So is the world now at the edge of disaster?
Mike Hulme, a professor of human geography at the University of Cambridge, asserts that it isn’t. “There’s no ‘cliff edge’ that emerges from any of the scientific analyses that have been done about these thresholds,” he said. “They are, in many senses, just arbitrary numbers plucked because they are either integers or half of an integer.”
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Of course, the thing that’s going to happen is, “Well, if 1.5 is now in the back mirror, what’s in the front mirror now?” There’s going to be a lot of work done to reconstruct a narrative for those people who think that 1.5 was the be-all and the end-all. There’s now going to have to be very significant work in reeducating and reframing what the future actually holds, if 1.5 is no longer the benchmark.
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Read more: https://grist.org/language/world-climate-target-doomed-mike-hulme-deadlines/
The Grist article is long, so it covers a lot of ground not mentioned in the quotes above.
But the fortuitously early arrival of 1.5C warming, and the lack of any accompanying climate disasters, will likely hasten the demise of the climate movement.
Because unlike the 1970s global cooling scare, the internet age has abundant digital records of how alarmists tried to frighten people with “arbitrary numbers” like 1.5C global warming.
I look forward to enriching attempts to “rebuild the narrative” by replaying lots of ridiculous 1.5C scare campaign material.
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Models are human geography – so is UHI.
The best way to study temperature responses to humans is to place measurement sites closer to humans – simple really.
Maybe he should have looked at the UAH lower troposphere data before he made his
guessclimate projection..While I acknowledge there is a long term warming trend over the last 150 years, I don’t really see 2025 being 1.°C warmer than the reference year.
(whatever that was 1850 or 1870? Doesn’t matter much, we do not know the global temperature for either year with an precision)
My understanding is that the 2.0C threshold of doom was someone’s arbitrary choice with no justification, and the infamous Phil Jones of the CRU agrees with that statement.
1.5C simply gives a margin of safety.
Some of the earlier economic analyses showed warming as net positive to around 2 degrees C.
The lead author slips my mind, sorry.
Nordhaus’s work with his DICE model showed that the cost of mitigation exceeded the damage of increased temperature to around 3 degrees C. This is somewhat different to the above net positive analyses.
Potsdam usedDICE with modified parameters to give the 1.5 degree C “break even”.
‘And so, all the governments in the world got together and some of them said, well, we’re already at one degree and it’s dangerous for us. And then some of them said, well, you know, we’ve crunched the numbers, we think three degrees will be OK for us but beyond that is dangerous. And everybody had to negotiate to figure out, well, what do we agree on? And they agreed finally on two degrees or one and a half, If we can.
Kathern Hayhoe from an interview with Forbes
1.5 has always been a political number and had nothing to do with science
The 1.5 degree target is a 30 year average. Passing 1.5 degrees a single year is not the same as passing the 1.5 degree target. Please don’t feed the alarmists.