Impending Doom: You Can Count On It

If you're feeling optimistic that the meeting of the world's climate scientists in Cancun might help avert catastrophe, you can stop feeling that way now.

A hellish vision of a world warmed by 4C within a lifetime has been set out by an international team of scientists, who say the agonisingly slow progress of the global climate change talks that restart in Mexico today makes the so-called safe limit of 2C impossible to keep. A 4C rise in the planet's temperature would see severe droughts across the world and millions of migrants seeking refuge as their food supplies collapse.

"There is now little to no chance of maintaining the rise in global surface temperature at below 2C, despite repeated high-level statements to the contrary," said Kevin Anderson, from the University of Manchester, who with colleague Alice Bows contributed research to a special collection of Royal Society journal papers published tomorrow. "Moreover, the impacts associated with 2C have been revised upwards so that 2C now represents the threshold [of] extremely dangerous climate change."

[...]

The scientists' modelling is based on actual tonnes of emissions, not percentage reductions, and separates the predicted emissions of rich and fast-industrialising nations such as China. "2010 represents a political tipping point," said Anderson, but added in the report: "This paper is not intended as a message of futility, but rather a bare and perhaps brutal assessment of where our 'rose-tinted' and well-intentioned approach to climate change has brought us. Real hope and opportunity, if it is to arise at all, will do so from a raw and dispassionate assessment of the scale of the challenge faced by the global community."

[...]

Rachel Warren, at the University of East Anglia, described a 4C world in her research paper: "Drought and desertification would be widespread ... There would be a need to shift agricultural cropping to new areas, impinging on [wild] ecosystems. Large-scale adaptation to sea-level rise would be necessary. Human and natural systems would be subject to increasing levels of agricultural pests and diseases, and increases in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events."

Warren added: "This world would also rapidly be losing its ecosystem services, owing to large losses in biodiversity, forests, coastal wetlands, mangroves and saltmarshes [and] an acidified and potentially dysfunctional marine ecosystem. In such a 4C world, the limits for human adaptation are likely to be exceeded in many parts of the world."

Let's review:

• The so-called safe limit of a 2 degree centigrade temperature increase will be "impossible to keep."
  
• "[T]he impacts associated with 2C have been revised upwards so that 2C now represents the threshold [of] extremely dangerous climate change." But of course, limiting the temperature increase to just two degrees is impossible, so extremely dangerous climate change is a certainty.
  
• "Real hope and opportunity, if it is to arise at all, will do so from a raw and dispassionate assessment of the scale of the challenge faced by the global community." A raw and dispassionate assessment of the problem by policymakers is about as likely as a magic unicorn riding a cloud of pixie dust into your living room. It ain't gonna happen. Ergo, "real hope and opportunity" are out the window.
  

Instead of toys this holiday season, you should really consider sending your children to a survival training course. It's the least you can do in return for destroying their planet.

UPDATE: When asked how this year's conference in Cancun will be different from last year's disastrous failure in Copenhagen, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, had this to say: "At least the weather will be better."

[Guardian]