"A World We Have to Avoid at All Costs"

So what about a 4°C rise?  This is a world that we have to avoid at all costs.  Many scientists suggest that a 4°C rise is incompatible with an organised global community.  It is beyond “adaptation.”  Yet this review of 4°C temperature rise does not take into account possible feedbacks and other discontinuities, which on average are anticipated to make the situation worse still.

So a 4 degrees future is something we must avoid.  And that takes us back to 2 degrees – albeit with increasingly lower probabilities of achieving even this.  What does 2°C imply for the wealthy parts of the world, the OECD countries?  It means a 10% reduction in emissions every single year: a 40% reduction in the next few years and a 70% reduction within the decade.  Such reductions are necessary if poor parts of the world are to have a small emission space to help their welfare and wellbeing improve.

Despite the coherence of this analysis, I am repeatedly advised that such levels of mitigation are impossible.  At the same time, living as a civilised global community with a 4 degrees rise would also seem impossible.  In other words: the future is impossible!

So what do we do?  We have to develop a different mind-set – and quickly.  The impossibility we face on mitigation may open us to conceiving of different futures – moving beyond the reductionist thinking of the twentieth century, and towards new ways of framing issues in the twenty-first century."

- Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research

"A World We Have to Avoid at All Costs"