As far as I know there isn’t much basis to 1) managing to keep it below 2C (which is considered unlikely by now) or 2) that 2C is particularly important anyways. Bad stuff will and does happen below 2C, and there isn’t that much evidence that says “x happens at 2C” afaik. Like, I’m pretty sure they picked it because it’s a round number. The answer to the question “how much should we limit climate change” is always “more than what we are doing” and the answer to “where’s the tipping point and does it exist?” tends to be “who the fuck knows, it’s probably somewhere upwards of now”. I’m not sure I like how some people are taking the tipping point stuff and running with it to argue that it’s pointless to do anything anyways.
Predictive modeling is just predictive modeling, and science is just science. The expectation of people (of which I’m not going to presume where you fit on this) is that these academic pursuits are supposed to be infallible or that they are the hard authority on ANY matter is farcical. The truth is, they are working with the data as the receive it, and with knowledge that has been ascertained, and its a giant machine (academic work that is) that every now in then has some break through or idea that gets mainstream and popular amongst people and politicians.
So idk if I’m just riffing with you or not, but yeah it’s always been “who the fuck knows”, even the papers that you’ve seen cited in news articles like the one in this thread, they all work off the preconditioned assumption that they could be wrong, and everyone should know that. But 2C of warming is essentially, according to what we know right now, the point where it gets really fucked.
And yeah, I know academics are stuffy and arrogant a lot of the time, think they’re really right and are willing to fight like hell to look at data and outright lie or obfuscate the truth. But at least on this, whether they’re lying and it could be sooner, or later, it hardly fucking matters, because if we don’t do anything at all, it’s pretty much guaranteed, unless you (I’m using the general case of you) are a climate denier.
But 2C of warming is essentially, according to what we know right now, the point where it gets really fucked.
Yes, what I’m saying is that given what I’ve seen this is just not the case, 2C is just a somewhat random threshold. It’s not something academics came up with as an actual threshold. I’ve been searching about where this came from and the sources I’ve found seem to say that it’s not really an important threshold, just something that’s sorta useful to think about as a milestone: https://theconversation.com/why-is-climate-changes-2-degrees-celsius-of-warming-limit-so-important-82058
The reason I’m not crazy about these sorts of thresholds people come up with is that if we pass them or if we discover we are bound to pass them, then many people will just use it as an excuse to say “welp, we did what we could, now stop bothering us and let us do whatever”. Though I will admit I don’t know as much as I would like to about the subject and I’m planning to read some books on climate to better understand what is happening.
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.
