Planning to “adapt” to 3°C of warming risks normalising catastrophic outcomes - and avoiding the urgent task of deep, immediate decarbonisation.

Has climate policy-making gone right off the rails? That question pops into my head with increasing frequency these days, most recently when I glanced at a _Guardian_ news headline: ‘Daunting but doable’: Europe urged to prepare for 3°C of global heating.

The European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change has a new report, _Strengthening resilience to climate change recommendations for an effective EU adaptation policy framework_,  and the story quoted Board member Maarten van Aalst saying that adapting to a hotter future was in part “common sense and low-hanging fruit… It is a daunting task, but at the same time quite a doable task. It’s not rocket science.”

This is truly extraordinary.

I thought of Johan Rockström, the director of the Potsdam Institute, who has repeatedly warned that even 2.5°C “would lead to a complete melting of the big ice sheets, which would be a 10-metre sea level rise”, plus the collapse of all the big biomes on planet Earth and of marine biology, and with over one-third of the planet around the equatorial regions uninhabitably hot.

Warming has in practical terms already reached 1.5°C, the rate has accelerated by half, and 2°C by around 2040 seems likely. The global LNG industry sees exports doubling by 2050. That’s a 3°C or more path, and most scientists agree.

The worst thing we can do is pretend that living in a 3°C warmer world is not such a big........

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