Climate Change
Ronald Bailey | 12.12.2023 12:50 PM
Dubai, United Arab Emirates—"The North Star of the COP28 Presidency is to keep 1.5°C within reach," has been the frequent refrain of Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, the COP28 president overseeing the current U.N. climate change negotiations in Dubai. Al Jaber is reflecting the oft-chanted activist slogan "Keep 1.5 Alive!" The idea is that humanity must reduce its emissions of globe-warming greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels sufficiently to keep the planet from warming more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial baseline (1850-1900).
It is worth tracing the history of where the 1.5 C "North Star" originated and what the consequences of breaching it would likely be. The 1.5 C threshold was officially enshrined as a goal under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change with the adoption of the Paris Climate Change Agreement in 2015. Article 2 in the Paris Agreement commits signatories to strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change by "holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels, recognizing that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change."
In his 2007 article in Energy Policy, University of Sussex economist Richard S.J. Tol traces the germination of the 2 C target back to a 1995 report on a workshop convened by the German Advisory Council on Global Change. It is notable that only one member of the eleven-member advisory council was a meteorologist, but, on the other hand, there were four economists.
The advisors adopted two principles to guide their work. The first was the "preservation of Creation in its present form" achieved chiefly by staying........