“A MORAL TARGET”
It was a stunning diplomatic coup. Many scientists, however, were less than thrilled.
“It will be very hard – if not impossible – to keep warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius during the entire 21st century,” Joeri Rogelj, a climate modeller currently at Imperial College London who played a key role in the technical report, told AFP at the time.
But because the target was part of the Paris Agreement, nations called on the IPCC – which exists to brief policymakers on climate science – for a “special report”.
The resulting bombshell, delivered in October 2018, left no doubt as to the difference a half-a-degree makes: a 1.5 degrees Celsius world will see deep change but remain liveable; a 2 degrees Celsius world could tip the climate system into overdrive, outstripping our capacity to adapt, it warned.
Today, the IPCC – including Rogelj, a lead author of the 2018 report – insists that the 1.5 degrees Celsius goal is technically feasible.
But that conclusion hangs by the thinnest of threads.
There is no scenario that avoids “overshooting” the target, and bringing temperatures back under the wire will require extracting billions of tonnes of CO2 from thin air, something we can’t do yet at scale.
But whether the 1.5 degrees Celsius target is feasible may be missing the point, say others.
“Getting 1.5 degrees Celsius into the agreement was a moral target,” Huq told AFP not long after the Paris pact was inked.
“It’s our leverage, the whip we will use to hit everybody on the back so they can go faster,” he added.
“Whether we achieve it or not is going down a dark track. From now on, it’s about raising ambition.”
Piers Forster, director of the University of Leeds Priestley International Centre for Climate and a coordinating lead author for the IPCC, describes the 1.5 degrees Celsius objective as a “huge, but not impossible, task”.
“Hopefully the IPCC report can push the urgency,” he told AFP. “If it’s ignored, we would have to give up on 1.5 degrees Celsius.”
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