Hey! Check us out: We, the global society of interested parties in climate change. Here we are, the community of climate scientists, policy makers, campaigners, citizens, bloggers, cranks, PR companies, business leaders. What are we doing? We are playing a game. It’s called the “Targets game”, it’s about how to respond to climate change, and I’m going to suggest that, no matter how useful it feels, it’s a wildly inappropriate way to be spending our time.

To play the targets game, (it’s very popular) you discuss what a ‘safe’ level of carbon emissions is. All you need is what we have – a reasonable picture of the effects climate change is having on our planet. Over the past decade, there’s been a concerted effort on the part of many of us to work out, based on this picture, what the ‘safe’ level of emissions is. And this discussion, because it starts from the very reasonable and understandable place of working out where we are now, is framed in the language of ‘targets’ for cutting our current emissions, usually pegged against 1990 levels of emissions.

So, you’ll hear about a range of values, usually from 50% to 80%, depending on how ambitious people are feeling, (ranging from 50% being discussed in the US Senate, to 80% for the mainstream UK NGOs.) The targets will also have dates attached, so you’ll get, for example, 60% cuts on 1990 levels by 2050.

Now, where I work we enjoy playing the targets game. What’s our game playing strategy? Over the past couple of years we have spent a lot of time arguing for higher and faster emissions cuts. In particular, we have laid out the case for, and the pathway to, 100% emissions cuts by 2027 in the UK. And we’ve been doing a lot of thinking for how this target relates to other targets that are out there. Why do we go for the higher target? Why 100%? Are we radicals? Are we overly ambitious? Are we naive? What kind of players are we?

This kind of debate we’ve been having got a bit of a boost a few days ago when an article appeared in the Washington post, declaring that a number of different groups of scientists had come to the conclusion that “The world must bring carbon emissions down to near zero to keep temperatures from rising further.” So now, more people are calling for 100% emissions cuts. What does this new statement tell us about the targets game?

In order to understand, let’s get a quick appraisal of the climate science, as it stood in 2006. In a paper that the IPPR put together a few years ago , they came to the conclusion that even with very ambitious cuts in global emissions we could still expect up to a 43% chance of having more than 2 degrees of global warming – 2 degrees being widely regarded as the cut off point above which everything gets very bad. And they were talking about ambitious cuts – cuts which ended up looking like 88% cuts on 1990 levels by 2050 for the UK.

Wow, that’s quite a lot. And there are some further complications to that. While we do have a reasonable picture of what climate change is doing to our planet, it’s a long, long way from perfect. Every month there’s a new development from some climate scientist or another, telling us (overwhelmingly) that the problem is more serious, that we have less time, that even more radical action is needed. Through some recent work, it’s become increasingly clear to me that with the impacts of climate change we are currently seeing, 2 degrees isn’t (gulp) going to cut it anymore. (I’m not going to try and justify this pretty bold statement here, but that is the direction climate scientists are heading.) We need to aim for temperature rises lower than that. We need to hold on to summer sea ice in the Arctic. We need to (gulp!) end up with atmospheric concentrations of CO2 lower than we have at the moment.

What’s the target that gives us that? Is it, shorthand here, 90%? 95%? 100%, cuts in our society’s emissions? If it is, we are squeezing what we’re aiming for into the extreme end of the targets game spectrum. How much wriggle room do we have?

It’s a difficult question to answer. Part of the problem is that targets are concepts that operate at a really high level of abstraction from the thing we’re really interested in – the impacts of climate change. Let’s think about it. The impacts – whether physical or social, ice caps melting, massive migration, etc. – are basically a result of temperature rise, but there’s a lot of scientific uncertainty about what temperature rise causes what impacts. Said temperature rise is a product of the extra heat entering the planet’s system as a result of increased radiative forcing (imbalances in the amount of heat energy entering and leaving the system) which is itself a product of all sorts of wildly complicated processes – including the amount of aerosols in the atmosphere, cloud formation, surface albedo of the planet, and (most commonly known and very significantly) the concentration of different greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the atmosphere. The concentration of GHGs in the atmosphere is a product of our historical emissions, our current emissions, our future emissions patterns, and the carbon cycling capacity of the planet, which is also changing as a result of climate change (as well as any carbon cycling we try and do ourselves – planting forests, for instance, or capturing carbon.) When we talk about targets, we add another level of abstraction onto discussing our current emissions – in the UK, for instance, we currently, conveniently, ignore international aviation and shipping when we talk about emissions targets.

What does the last, long and slightly tortuous paragraph mean? It means it’s very, very difficult to move seamlessly from a discussion of targets to an understanding of what actual real-world impacts they’re going to lead to. And the situation is made even worse – because we’re constantly scrambling to update targets, which exist at one end of the abstraction process, based on our rapidly changing understanding of climate science, which is giving us a whole variety of piecemeal but generally worrying information about the opposite end.

So what’s the attraction of dealing with these rather unwieldy concepts? I think the reason that the targets game make sense to us, intuitively, is because it’s rooted in our conceptual comfort zone – in an understanding of the situation we’re in which suggests there’s still wriggle room in our climate predicament, that in order to avert ‘disaster’, we can change how we live by 50%, say, or maybe even 80%. When we suggest targets, it feels to us like we’re trying to find the sweet spot between ensuring our safety, and the inevitable social and economic costs of cutting emissions. We look at the science, we do the maths, and we get a number we can tweak, one way or another. Tweak it higher, and we get a bit safer. Tweak it lower, and we get a solution more acceptable to business, politicians, and all those other vested interests, (including, perhaps, ourselves). That’s the beauty of the game – it lets us discuss where the sweet spot is.

I think there’s a problem here, and I’m just going to say it. The problem with the above way of thinking is that in reality, there is no sweet spot between 0% and 100%. I’ll write that again, because it seems to me to be really important: There is no sweet spot.

Why not? Because we’re not playing the game we think we are. We still think that we’re playing the old game of trade-off, zero-sum, you win I lose, push and pull between safety and reasonableness – ‘us vs. them’ – us being the greenies, ‘them’ being BP et al. We’re not. If we were playing that game, we’d need a total pot of winnings to divide between us at the end – crazy radicals and vested interests. But that’s not how the winnings are going to be doled out. We are playing a game that is not zero-sum, it is either total sum (i.e. we survive as a species with some level of comfort and equity), or no sum at all (i.e. it is game over). There is no reasonable on the spectrum, not when we’re playing a game for every stake possible.

In other words, friends, whatever game you thought we were playing, we are actually in a game of let’s-get-the-hell-out-of-carbon. And the thing about let’s-get-the-hell-out-of-carbon is that when it comes to what I used to think of as ‘targets’ there’s only one rule: As low as possible, as soon as possible. (My colleague refers to this, terribly, as ALAPASAP).