Monbiot: Say goodbye to 2 degrees of warming

by GEORGE MONBIOT Quietly in public, loudly in private, climate scientists everywhere are saying the same thing: it’s over. The years in which more than 2 degrees of global warming could have been prevented have passed, the opportunities squandered by denial and delay. On current trajectories we’ll be lucky to get away with 4 degrees. Mitigation (limiting greenhouse gas pollution) has failed, now we must adapt to what nature sends our way. If we can. This was the repeated whisper at the climate change conference in Copenhagen earlier this month. It is more or less what Bob Watson, the environment department’s chief scientific adviser, has been telling the British government. It is the obvious, if unspoken, conclusion of scores of scientific papers. Recent work by scientists at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, for instance, suggests that even global cuts of 3 per cent a year, starting in 2020, could leave us with 4 degrees of warming by the end of the century. At the moment, emissions are heading in the opposite direction at roughly the same rate. If this continues, what does it mean? Six? Eight? Ten degrees? Who knows? …