WTF? EU Climate Chief: Paris Talks Would Not Be A Failure Even If 2C Target Missed

Lipstick on a corpse. Fucking unbelievable.

The European Union climate chief says talks at a major climate summit in Paris this year will not be a failure even if governments fail to keep warming below the dangerous 2C threshold. The comments, downgrading expectations for a strong outcome at Paris, suggest that the architects of a global climate deal are already resigned to the prospect that governments will fail to aim high enough when setting out their targets for cutting greenhouse gas emission in the coming months.

“2C is an objective,” Miguel Arias Canete, the EU climate chief, said. “If we have an ongoing process you can not say it is a failure if the mitigration commitments do not reach 2C.” The 2C target was the internationally agreed goal of the climate negotiations. But Canete, who was visiting Washington this week for talks with the state department climate envoy, Todd Stern, said: “Any step forward is a step forward.”

However, he added “but we want ambitious objectives for 2015”, and said it was crucial that negotiators agreed on an accounting mechanism for reviewing those climate pledges and then raising them to avoid catastrophic warming.

In Brussels, meanwhile, the UN top climate official, Christiana Figueres, was similarly downplaying expectations, telling reporters the pledges made in the run-up to the Paris meeting later this year will “not get us onto the 2C pathway”. The sober comments from two of the top players at Paris were a further sign that officials do not see the meeting in December as an end game but the next phase of the effort to get governments to deliver action on climate change.

EDIT

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/feb/04/paris-climate-summit-missing-global-warming-target-would-not-be-failure