Luers warns global warming likely to surpass 2 degrees Celsius target
"A policy narrative that continues to frame this target as the sole metric of success or failure to constrain climate change risk is now itself becoming dangerous," wrote Todd Sanford and Peter Frumhoff of UCS in the commentary published Wednesday in Nature Climate Change. "[It] ill-prepares society to confront and manage the risks of a world that is increasingly likely to experience warming well in excess of 2°C this century," said the piece, co-authored by Amy Luers of the San Francisco-based Skoll Global Threats Fund, and Jay Gulledge, of the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
"Inadvertently, the [IPCC] reinforces the present narrative by failing to provide policymakers with guidance on how to weigh the relative likelihood of the scenarios of future concentrations of heat-trapping gases and other drivers of warming on which its climate change projections are based," the authors said.