All the major nations are failing to meet their Paris targets says Nature paper

The Magnificent Paris deal was rubbery-theatre, make-of-it-what-you-will, and with rare diligence here is Nature publishing a paper where a team bothered to check progress. (If only Nature held scientific research as accountable as political deals we wouldn’t have bothered with Paris in the first place. MBH98 anyone — where Mann’s hockeystick was accepted by Nature, but not the corrections?)

Lo, Nature does its own bit of conspiracy thinking:

“It is easy for politicians to make promises to impatient voters and opposition parties. But it is hard to impose high costs on powerful, well-organized groups. No system for international governance can erase these basic political facts. Yet the Paris agreement has unwittingly fanned the flames by letting governments set such vague and unaccountable pledges.”“

Suddenly skeptics are powerful and well-organised groups? Neither authors, editors, nor reviewers considered the banal truth that it costs trillions to change the energy system our civilizations were built on, and millions of voters don’t want to pay. They are only organised in the sense that we still hold elections.

In 2015, The Guardian said “decades of failure were reversed, and a historic agreement reached.”

Skeptics called it a “worthless piece of paper”.

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