LONDON: The target to keep global warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels – as agreed on during climate talks in 2010 – may be unachievable. Even if it is possible, scientists argue that it may not be enough to save many of the planet’s species.
A United Nations scientific panel is assessing the chances of significantly limiting greenhouse gas emissions to meet the 2-degree goal, ahead of December climate talks in Paris. The panel is gauging if it will be effective — and whether an even more ambitious 1.5-degree limit should be considered.
When the 2-degree limit was agreed to at a 2010 conference in Cancún, Mexico, it faced intense opposition from the low-lying island nations and poor countries at greatest risk from rising sea levels and extremes of weather. They pushed instead for the stricter 1.5-degree limit.
The majority of support for the 2-degree plan came from industrialized nations better equipped to adapt to climate change.
Geographer Petra Tschakert of Penn State University, a scientist involved in the new assessment, said she supports the lower limit.
“Without a doubt, it is in the utmost interest of a large number of countries to pursue the 1.5-degree C target, as ambitious or idealistic it may appear to date, and to see it anchored as a binding goal…” she wrote in an article for Climate Change Responses.Other scientists have also urged consideration for the lower figure.
At a climate conference last year in Lima, Peru, Hans-Otto Pörtner from the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremen argued, “some species would struggle to cope with the speed of 2-degree C warming, but that most organisms should be able to move to a different place under 1.5-degree C.”
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