Hearing the completely wrong message, of course

Hey, JC, you are completely wrong, of course.

It was predictable that any paper that says "maybe we can still limit global warming to 1.5 to 2 degrees because it seems to us that models have been running a bit 'hot'" would be interpreted by twits like you as "the models are all wrong, and this is fantastic everything is going to stop at 1.5 degrees".

Are you typical of traders?  Because if so, it seems to show that traders can have the analytical abilities of a 10 year old and still be able to make a living. It's quite surprising to me, in a way.

Anyway, to better educate yourself (yes I know - as if) on what the paper means, try reading ATTP with his succinct list of doubts about the paper, which will no doubt be expanded upon by others over the next few days.  Many scientists in the field are skeptical about the methods used to reach their conclusion, and it's actually not hard to understand why, even at this stage.  

Then try David Roberts at Vox on this, and his explanation of how the new paper, even if correct, is like this:

It’s like we’re starting a 100-mile marathon, and we’ve got to read a book while we’re running, but we also need to build upper-body strength, so we’re holding the book with one hand and lifting a barbell with the other, and by the way, we’ve never run farther than 10 miles.

Now, along comes this new paper that says, effectively, “Hey, the marathon is only 99 miles!”

That’s ... nice and all. It’s great that what we need to do is not geophysically impossible, merely more difficult than anything humanity has ever done before, by multiples.

I reckon the reason the authors of the new paper might like to sound optimistic of the implications is because they recognise that one lukewarmer argument is the defeatist one that it is already too late to do anything about emissions, and we may as well forget about them and work out how to do geoengineering as the only possible solution.

But always, always, the danger in any paper revising in any way what they think the models mean is that people like you will say "see, the climate scientists were always wrong and now admit that it's all rubbish and everything is going to be fine".  It's the completely wrong message to take, but you're ideologically motivated to hear it wrong. 

As it happens, everyone else at Catallaxy is too high on the red cordial of Trump at the UN, so they don't seem to be showing much interest anyway.  

Truly, the Right of politics has never been more globally dangerous.

Update:  And here is the proper perspective, from some of the new paper's authors (my bold, to make it easier for comprehension challenged traders to follow):

In a study published in Nature Geoscience, we and our international colleagues present a new estimate of how much carbon budget is left if we want to remain below 1.5℃ of global warming relative to pre-industrial temperatures (bearing in mind that we are already at around 0.9℃ for the present decade).

We calculate that by limiting total CO₂ emissions from the beginning of 2015 to around 880 billion tonnes of CO₂ (240 billion tonnes of carbon), we would give ourselves a two-in-three chance of holding warming to less than 0.6℃ above the present decade. This may sound a lot, but to put it in context, if CO₂ emissions were to continue to increase along current trends, even this new budget would be exhausted in less than 20 years 1.5℃ (see Climate Clock). This budget is consistent with the 1.5℃ goal, given the warming that humans have already caused, and is substantially greater than the budgets previously inferred from the 5th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), released in 2013-14....

The emissions reductions required to stay within this budget remain extremely challenging. CO₂ emissions would need to decline by 4-6% per year for several decades. There are precedents for this, but not happy ones: these kinds of declines have historically been seen in events such as the Great Depression, the years following World War II, and during the collapse of the Soviet Union – and even these episodes were relatively brief.

Yet it would be wrong to conclude that greenhouse emissions can only plummet during times of economic collapse and human misery. Really, there is no historical analogy to show how rapidly human societies can rise to this challenge, because there is also no analogy for the matrix of problems (and opportunities) posed by climate change.