2 degrees of confusion

Of course, Graham Lloyd, or whoever writes his headlines, has twisted the (admittedly rather confusingly argued) commentary that appeared in Nature about the 2 degree limit favoured by the IPCC to make it sound as if the limit is nothing to worry about.

Then the coal miners' economist of choice, Sinclair Davidson, goes on a self serving ramble about how this is climate scientists admitting the 2 degree target is a "failure", and (it would seem) reading the article to mean that because scientists now think that it is not going to be hit, or not going to be hit as soon as previously thought, they have to add other "fudge factors".

As I have already indicated, the Nature commentary piece is confusingly constructed, but one would have thought that even a libertarian could see that the part where they say the 2 degree limit is "unachievable" means that they are concerned that the world will easily surpass it.

But of course, in the multi headed beast that is climate change skepticism, anything is clutched at as reason not to do anything.  It's any or all of the following (amongst dozens of other reasons):  "the scientists are fraudulently fiddling the temperature record", "it's warming but who knows if it will be harmful?", "hey, maybe it's cooling!"  "the cost of doing anything would be worse than adapting" or "it's too late, the world will overshoot 2 degrees and we should only worry about adaptation."

There is no logical consistency - only ideology driven positions against governments taking serious action against planet changing, possibly very disastrous for huge numbers of our descendants, greenhouse gas emissions.

So - actual good articles on the 2 degree matter are at Stoat and Real Climate.

Read them if you want to make some sense of the situation.

As Real Climate notes, if anything, the worry amongst scientists has increasingly been that the 2 degree limit is set too high - but (I would add) this is no reason for defeatism: if (say) 1.8 degrees is more damagingly planet changing that first feared, then overshooting it by another .5 to 1 degree is also way worse than originally thought and still worthy of avoidance.

And as I understand it, even on the lowest estimates of climate sensitivity, if you keep burning carbon the way libertarians think we should, the planet will still exceed 2 degrees in a matter of decades, not centuries.

That's my take on it anyway...