The much-lauded Paris Agreement of 2015 included a catch, shrewdly hidden among the fine print.
-
The much-lauded Paris Agreement of 2015 included a catch, shrewdly hidden among the fine print.
See, the negotiators actually knew that with Business As Usual (which, of course, could never be abandoned), global temperatures would almost certainly rise above their lovely 1.5°C target.
So they built in the clever idea that by 2050 or so, capitalism will have perfected a fancy new technology that could quickly and easily remove a HUGE amount of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere with the excess carbon stored safely away, thereby lowering temperatures — and all this could be achieved *without* having to burn an equal amount of fossil fuels in the process.
Looking back, anyone can see the fallacy. At the time, though, it seemed like a good idea, at least to some people. Now, however, the truth is coming out...
___________________________________Humanity’s ability to restore Earth’s temperature below 1.5°C of warming after overshooting it cannot be guaranteed.
Many impacts of climate change are essentially irreversible. Those that are might take decades to undo, well beyond the relevant horizon for climate politics. For policy makers of the future, it matters little that temperatures might eventually fall back again; the impacts they will need to plan for are those of the overshoot period itself.
Avoiding climate breakdown demands that we bury the fantasy of overshoot-and-return and with it another illusion as well: that the Paris targets can be met without uprooting the status-quo. One limit after the other will be broken unless we manage to strand fossil fuel assets and curtail opportunities for continuing to profit from oil and gas and coal.
We will not mitigate climate change without confronting and defeating fossil fuel interests.
___________________________________FULL ESSAY -- https://theconversation.com/how-mainstream-climate-science-endorsed-the-fantasy-of-a-global-warming-time-machine-225597
#History #Science #Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis
