Abstract
“I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.”
Lord Kelvin 1883
The Copenhagen Accord reiterates the international community’s commitment to “hold the increase in global temperature below 2 degrees Celsius”. Similarly, the EU maintains it ‘must ensure global average temperature increases do not exceed 2°C’ and the UK’s 2009 Low Carbon Transition Plan, states that “to avoid the most dangerous impacts of climate change, average global temperatures must rise no more than 2°C”. Despite such unequivocal statements the accompanying policies or absence of policies demonstrate a pivotal disjuncture between high-level aspirations with regards to 2°C and the policy reality. In part this reflects the continued dominance of ‘end point’ targets rather than scientifically-credible emission budgets and pathways, but even within the UK, where the policy-community and legislation aligns more closely with the science of climate change, the disjuncture nevertheless remains.
