A short excerpt from some comments at http://www.declineoftheempire.com/2015/11/the-unforgivable-sin.html#comments
It's politically unpalatable for most nations to see complete failure in Paris. We will get some sort of agreement. The governmental leaders and the media will then tout the "success" of the event. The story will be that it's not enough, but it's a start
Now, here's the "success" of Paris put another way. Instead of "it wasn't enough, but it's a great start", it's "we couldn't currently treat the issue seriously enough, so we made a bunch of non-binding promises towards reducing only a percentage of emissions by going after the easiest sources to reduce with the assumption that most nations would keep these promises in faltering economies and shifting national governments, and then we hoped that we'd improve them further".
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From yesterday's Guardian:-
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/nov/23/over-2000-academics-world-heads-do-more-limit-global-warming-noam-chomsky
More than 2,000 academics from over 80 countries – including linguist Noam Chomsky, climate scientist Michael E Mann, philosopher Peter Singer, and historian Naomi Oreskes – have called on world leaders to do more to limit global warming to a 1.5C rise.
In an open letter, they write that leaders meeting in Paris at a crunch UN climate summit next week should “be mustering planet-wide mobilisation, at all societal levels” and call for citizens around the world to hold their leaders to account on the issue.
The world has already warmed by 1C above pre-industrial levels. Holding warming to 1.5C would be a far greater challenge than the 2C that leaders at previous climate talks have agreed to limit rises to. Current emissions pledges tabled ahead of the Paris summit would see warming of around 2.7-3C.
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The problem is that 1.5C is locked in even if we magically switched to zero emissions today. 2.5C is probably locked in as well. The optimistic view of the scientists is that if we meet our pledges to reduce emissions, then 2100 will see 2.7-3C rise. Except that we haven't actually started trying to meet those pledges. The rise in atmospheric CO2 is still accelerating. What we're really doing is business as usual blowing the whole #terafart of 1TtC into the atmosphere in the next 100 years.
So what exactly do we hope for from the Paris talks and the activism around them?
And yes, I'll be riding my petrol powered scooter into London to march on Sunday.
Today's bonus links.
http://cleantechnica.com/2015/11/23/not-good-enough-meta-analysis-climate-indc-studies/
http://www.wri.org/blog/2015/11/insider-why-are-indc-studies-reaching-different-temperature-estimates
http://climateactiontracker.org/