So much reading to do and so little time to do it.
Bob Watson interview with Pallab Ghosh yesterday was interesting on many levels, not least the fact that the BBC put the great man up against their science journalist rather than the usual greens. Not that it appears to have made very much difference.
Watson is retiring soon, although I don't doubt that he will continue to make his voice heard. The BBC interview seems to be his parting shot, and of course it is on climate change. When your legacy is the industrialisation of the British countryside, I guess you would want to get some justification on the table.
Professor Sir Robert Watson said that the hope of restricting the average temperature rise to 2C was "out the window".
He said that the rise could be as high as 5C - with dire conseqences.
Professor Watson added the Chancellor, George Osborne, should back efforts to cut the UK's CO2 emissions.
Interestingly, there now seem to be some differences of opinion over the issue of just what the consequences of a warming on this scale would be. For instance, Richard Tol tweeted yesterday:
...In this paper, I argue that 4 deg or so is optimal: http://ideas.repec.org/p/sus/susewp/3712.html …
Meanwhile Chris Hope (who did the economic model behind the Stern report) says that 2-4 degrees is non-disastrous.
It may be that these predictions are not all using the same baseline (I think Tol has used degrees above the present day in some of his work). But it does rather look as if we have many decades until we get into disaster territory. I wonder how many decades?