UN Target of 2 Degree Limit for Temperature Rise 'Utterly Inadequate'

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Petra Tschakert, Coordinating Lead Author of IPCC Climate Change Report, says the two degree limit will not prevent climate catastrophe - April 22, 2015

Transcript: The United Nations Framework on Climate Change has set an official target for the global rise of temperature at 2 degrees Celsius. The limit, which has been presented as a universally accepted goal, will guide the upcoming agreements at COP21 in Paris this December. But according to our next guest's recent report, 70% of all the countries signed on to this UN Framework find this limit too high. Instead, they're calling for the limit to be set at 1.5 degrees Celsius.

So without further ado, now joining us is Petra Tschakert. Petra is a human environment geographer who works on climate change adaptation, livelihood resistance, and social and environmental justice all around the world. She was the coordinating lead author on the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Record, [working group two] on a new chapter entitled Livelihoods and Poverty. Thank you so much for joining us today, Petra.

So Petra, why is the 1.5 degrees Celsius an important and better goal than 2 degrees? I mean, I think a lot of folks would hear that and say, does that half a degree really make a difference?

PETRA TSCHAKERT:, ASSOC. PROFESSOR, GEOGRAPHY AND THE EARTH ENVIRONMENTAL SYSTEMS INSTITUTE, PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY: That's a really good question. Think about it in the following way. First of all, let's clarify that we're talking about Celsius, here. So 2 degrees Celsius as a global warming record above pre-industrial time, so end of the 18th century. And if you think about it in Fahrenheit, that would be 3.6 Fahrenheit roughly, 1.5 indeed doesn't seem like a whole lot of a difference.

But think about this temperature target as a global average. It's not the temperature you or I would experience on a daily basis. It's really a mathematical construct. It's a collection of all the temperature targets around the world including thousands of temperature stations, climate stations in general, on land. But as well temperature records on the ocean, so sea surface temperature. Also including temperatures that come from satellites and temperatures that come from the Arctic. So it's an aggregate. It's a global average, that of course we can calculate in an Excel sheet, for example. But no real person experiences this global average on a daily basis.

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