Governments' concentration on long-term targets such the reduction of carbon emissions by 50 percent by 2050 in order to keep global warming to 2 degrees, are misguided and have no basis in science, according to a recent study.
Image: Drought. Credit: desi.italy/flickr
Though well-meaning, research by the University of Manchester's Dr Kevin Anderson and Dr Alice Bows has found that by focusing on such long term targets, little is being done to quell the worrying increase in current carbon emissions and their cumulative effect on future climate change.
“The 2007 Bali conference heard repeated calls for reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions of 50 per cent by 2050 to avoid exceeding the 2°C threshold," said Dr Bows. "While such endpoint targets dominate the policy agenda, they do not, in isolation, have a scientific basis and are likely to lead to dangerously misguided policies.To be scientifically credible, policy must be informed by an understanding of cumulative emissions and associated emission pathways."
“Every year that the emissions grow more than anticipated, as they have since 2000, the 2050 target will need to be adjusted. The less we take action now, the more we need to do in the future - and the focus on 2050 means we take our eye off the ball,” she said.
In a paper published in the geo-engineering edition of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, the scientists claim that current climate change rhetoric of keeping the targeted warming to 2 degrees is "dangerously misleading".
“The analysis presented within this paper suggests that the rhetoric of 2°C is subverting a meaningful, open and empirically informed dialogue on climate change. While it may be argued that 2°C provides a reasonable guide to the appropriate scale of mitigation, it is a dangerously misleading basis for informing the adaptation agenda," the paper said.
“In the absence of an almost immediate step change in mitigation - away from the current trend of 3 per cent annual emission growth - adaptation would be much better guided by stabilisation at 650 ppmv CO2e - approximately 4°C. However, even this level of stabilisation assumes rapid success in curtailing deforestation, an early reversal of current trends in non-CO2 greenhouse gas emissions and urgent decarbonisation of the global energy system," they continue.
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