2C warming “limit” comes from the “Report on the structured expert dialogue on the 2013–2015 review” FCCC/SB/2015/INF.1 published by the UN. You can just copy and paste that to get a pdf, since I’m not sure I can just post a link to a pdf here.

Furthermore from this same document (which is the one most commonly cited by the media and the one most people haven’t read at all but is where all these ideas somewhat were coalesced). Pg 15 of this same report goes into detail about what is expected at +2C. You can read the full thing there, once again but the narrative put forward by the commission is that “… some unique [ecological] systems would be at high risk; the risks of combined ocean warming and acidification would become high, and, for some phenomena such as mass coral bleaching, very high; and crop production would be at high risk…” with still some potential for crop production to be adapted. Furthermore, scientists go on to express that the +2C “limit” should be considered a “guardrail … that needs to be stringently defended, while less warming would be preferable”

Note that this is also 6-8 years old, but the consensus among academics present at this hearing is that “bad shit will happen, and we need to limit it to 2C or the risks for even worse shit go up significantly” (and that’s my editorialization but is an idea echoed by these experts throughout this report). They were likely also bourgeois academics, considering that they are at the UN, of all places, giving testimony, so the actual information has probably 1.) developed to further understanding in 6-8 years and 2.) is probably actually worse than what the bourgeois academics are willing to let on, in their interest, to not look like “sensationalists” to be able to collect more funding for their respective universities.

Like I said, these limits aren’t even described by the scientists themselves as this sort of magical thing. They admit that going a bit over is recoverable, and that staying below is preferred. It’s this pervasive anti-intellectualism and further still complete obfuscation of the facts, downplaying of the impact is going to have on us, by the media and, not to be overly harsh, but people such as yourself who, you even admit don’t know as much as you’d like, talk about this with an authority on the matter, thats going to continue to lead to the exact “well we went past that limit nothing else to do but die” mentality. I know the US education is abysmal, but I also know, having been a product of one of the shittier manifestations of it myself, that we all learn (or should have learned) how to talk about things that we aren’t experts in, by citing experts and reports that are found, and then discussing their merits in our analysis. For what its worth, most of the socialist literature that we all claim to have read sometimes, all also do this same “quoting and discussing” method that I’m talking about. It’s something we, as the collective “left” should all get back to doing, since we look all like dumbasses when we don’t.

Your own source is just some journalistic rag (not to mention its listed as one of the first 3 articles if you google searched “2c climate change limit theory”), that doesn’t even cite anyone even saying that the source of the theory of 2C is an economist. They just say it as though it were a fact and then go on to link the paper he wrote in 1975, as though the work of climate scientists in weighing the merit of that idea or the data that we have today in 2021 showing that 2C, as a concept, and as a pretty model-able idea, is completely negligible.