False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet

by Bjørn Lomborg

At the Paris climate summit, politicians also promised to keep global temperature from ever rising beyond 3.6°F (the so-called 2°C limit). Accomplishing this would mean cutting eighty times more carbon emissions than were actually promised (and remember, they are not on track to achieve even that much). To achieve the 3.6°F target, we would literally need new and additional carbon cuts of the same size as those in the Paris Agreement every single year from 2020 to 2100 (and we would need them to be actually delivered, not just promised). The politicians even went so far as to declare in their agreement that they wanted to limit the global temperature increase to below 2.7°F (1.5°C), which would mean cutting one hundred times more than what was promised in Paris. It is therefore accurate to say that the Paris Agreement—even if actually achieved—provides us with only one percent of what politicians are promising.