Current word out of Paris is that a new draft of a climate agreement won’t be ready until tomorrow (Saturday) morning, even though the climate summit is supposed to adjourn today. It is following the predictable script. There’s going to be a humdinger of an all-nighter in Paris tonight. The usual sticking points (who pays how much to whom) are all up in the air.
Meanwhile, just as a number of scientists have started to say that the hitherto sacred 2 degree Celsius warming target maybe isn’t so sacred after all (because the emissions commitments of the draft agreement won’t come close to achieving that target even if everyone meets their imaginary notional emissions limits), word is that the agreement will say that the policy target should be moved down to 1.5 degrees Celsius!
I can only imagine how this conversation went down in some Paris bistro: “I’ve got it! Since our current 2 degree target is unreachable, let’s swap it our for an even more unrealistic target!”
Climate criminal Chris Horner has an interesting and entirely plausible hypothesis about what might be behind this:
Emissions will continue to rise for a while yet and global temperatures will probably continue to defy the projections of modellers. But the 1.5° temperature rise limit will be there as the headline, which leads to an intriguing conclusion.
Maybe, just maybe, key players are beginning to see that the 4, 5 or 6° rise in temperature foreseen is increasingly unlikely and that Mankind’s contribution to climate change is much closer to that discussed by the much-vilified ‘lukewarmers’. What if there is a realisation that a lower temperature rise limit is safe to commit to because it is likely to be achieved without any change to present policy?
The net result could well be a continuation of the call for drastic decarbonisation combined with both a failure to achieve the goals and just a modest amount of global warming. If so, the IPCC could declare that it had saved the planet and there would be little need to confess to undue alarmism (maybe ‘the temperature rise falls within the projected range and is consistent with our models’?). Time then to adjust the focus to ocean acidification? There will be lots of people in the climate change industry who would be out of a job otherwise.
Since liberalism in general, and climatism in particular, are mostly about moral preening and feeling good about yourself (and assuring an unending stream of future meetings), this sounds about right.
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