Explained | Climate targets are becoming outdated, so India needs its own Premium

Both the 1.5- and the 2-degree-Celsius thresholds for global warming are grounded in political expediency more than science, even as reducing emissions as a paradigm for tackling climate change has essentially failed.

The 1.5 degrees Celsius warming target has received considerable press along with the El Niño this year. Reports claimed that the planet could soon cross this temperature threshold due to this natural climate phenomenon.

But even if the world’s average surface temperature warms by more than 1.5 degreesCelsius for a year, nothing dramatically different may happen – other than the heatwaves, floods, droughts, and similar events that are already happening. The bigger question is: where is all the end-of-the-world messaging coming from?

Humankind might do well with less hyperbole about the climate crisis. It is a serious challenge today, yes, but a constant drumbeat of alarmist messages may only exacerbate climate anxiety and leave people feeling helpless – especially the young ones, who should be dreaming about saving the planet (or space travel) instead.

The target agreed to in the Paris Agreement, to keep the planet’s surface from warming by 2 degrees Celsius by the end of this century, has been touted as a monumental achievement, and it may well be if we actually manage to achieve this goal by 2100. But we must bear two things in mind. First, despite negotiations among the representatives of the world’s countries for more than two decades, global carbon emissions have shown no signs of slowing down.

Second, the 2 degrees Celsius target was not derived scientifically. The economics Nobel laureate William Nordhaus cautiously noted in the 1970s that a warming of 2 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial level could render the planet warmer than it has ever been in several hundred-thousand years. He followed this claim up with a model of the socioeconomic impacts of crossing this threshold.

Some European politicians found this round number to be appealing as something to aim for in the 1990s, followed by climate scientists retrofitting their projected climate impacts to this warming level. Indeed, no sooner was this figure enshrined in the Paris Agreement than the Alliance of Small Island States demanded that it be lowered to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Once again, the climate community, now together with the socioeconomic-modelling community, retrofitted future scenarios to meet this so-called “aspirational” target.

Bringing science to serve society is a very noble goal, particularly when government officials demand scientific inputs for their decision-making. But many governments’ planned reliance on bioenergy and carbon-capture technologies to accomplish these goals do not consider the potential consequences of climate change on food and water security, for example – let alone the possibility that such promises have a long way to go before becoming viable.