Professor Kevin Anderson:

I do not have an issue with them. They have nothing to do with the commitments the Taoiseach made. They are political numbers that are pulled out of the air with a whole lot of assumptions around them to make them look legitimate. Just take the IPCC scenarios and do some very clear science and numerical analysis with explicit assumptions. How much is one relying on future generations sucking the CO2 out of the air? How much of the carbon budget of poor countries is one prepared to take away from them when they are already struggling as it is? What we are doing with the budgets at the moment is either forcing future generations to put up with more climate change or poor parts of the world to have their development cut even further. There is no easy way out of this. We should have started 30 years ago. At some point we have to draw a line and from that moment, be honest to our commitments and to the science. We are still not prepared to do that because it is politically too challenging.