France’s minister for ecological transition Christophe Béchu caused alarm in February 2023 by saying he wanted to prepare France for a temperature increase of 4ºC. There was further alarm in December after the COP28 meeting, when he announced his climate change adaptation plan: ‘A trajectory of 4ºC is not being pessimistic; it’s relying very precisely on what specialists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] and the United Nations are telling us, with a current trend in climate change leading us to a global increase of 2.8-3.2ºC, which translates to 4ºC for our country’.

This apparent pragmatism presumes international agreements will not be adhered to and will fail to adequately ‘mitigate’ warming through greenhouse gas emission reductions. Such a focus on adaptation has the advantage of indefinitely postponing politically costly decisions on mitigation. Currently, mitigation and adaptation policies are presented simplistically, as though their interconnection were straightforward, suggesting more adaptation can make up for insufficient mitigation.

This strategy conceals assumptions which don’t match the facts. It assumes adjustment to climate change impacts can happen gradually, like a dyke being raised by a single row of bricks at a time, though the ability to adjust will diminish in an increasingly unstable economic, industrial and political climate.

Though IPCC Working Group II (Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability) takes political and economic stability as a given, it implicitly recognises that above +1.5°C, its assessment of the scope for adaptation is a speculative response to a poorly defined problem. The working group’s co-chairs Hans-Otto Pörtner and Debra Roberts stress that adapting to +4°C is impossible. The IPCC has misled policymakers by adopting a supposedly apolitical position; this is in fact built on an unchanging economic model, in a context of sustainable development that excludes the risks of disruption and (…)

Full article: 1 555 words.

Fabienne Barataud,

Laurent Husson &

Stéphanie Mariette

Fabienne Barataud, Laurent Husson and Stéphanie Mariette are members of Scientist Rebellion. Fabienne Barataud is a geographer and research engineer at the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment (INRAE); Laurent Husson is a geophysicist and research director in earth sciences at the CNRS; Stéphanie Mariette is a population geneticist and research director at INRAE.