From Jonathan Wallace, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
Bill McGuire provides a gloomy assessment of progress since the Paris Climate Conference 10 years ago. He suggests that our failure to keep temperatures from rising by more than 1.5°C over pre-industrial levels is largely because this was treated as a target, not a limit (21 February, p 16).
This seems right to me, but I would add that the notion of net zero has also been misused in a way that hasn’t helped. As atmospheric carbon levels increase for every year that it takes us to reach net zero, it clearly matters how long it takes us to get there, but politicians often fail to grasp this. Net zero needs to be understood not as a point at which everything is fine, but the point at which further warming shouldn’t occur – which isn’t fine if we are already roasting by that stage.
