The participants at the Paris climate change conference saw themselves produce “an agreement hailed as ‘historic, durable and ambitious’”and “the world’s greatest diplomatic success,” according to the UK Guardian on Dec. 15, 2015.
The president of the Natural Resources Defense Council said, “A great tide has turned. Finally the world stands united against the central environmental challenge of our time.”
They were still basking in the glow of their success, when news arrived of a sudden and extreme rise in global temperature, described by climate scientists as “stunning”, “a shocker”, “a bombshell’, “hurtling at a frightening pace toward the globally agreed maximum of 2C warming over pre-industrial levels”, “a kind of climate emergency”, an event “using up all our room for manoevre.”
UK Guardian: “February breaks global temperature records by ‘shocking’ amount.” An event, in short, rendering almost obsolete everything done at the Paris conference.