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 Achieving the 2C (3.6 Fahrenheit) target has been the driving
force for climate negotiators and scientists, who say it is the
limit beyond which the world will suffer ever worsening floods,
droughts, storms and rising seas.
But six months before world leaders convene in Paris, prospects are
fading for a deal that would keep average temperatures below the
ceiling. Greenhouse gas emissions have reached record highs in
recent years.
And proposed cuts in carbon emissions from 2020 and promises to
deepen them in subsequent reviews - offered by governments wary of
the economic cost of shifting from fossil fuels - are unlikely to be
enough for the 2C goal.
"Paris will be a funeral without a corpse," said David Victor, a
professor of international relations at the University of
California, San Diego, who predicts the 2C goal will slip away
despite insistence by many governments that is still alive.
"It's just not feasible," said Oliver Geden, of the German Institute
for International and Security Affairs. "Two degrees is a focal
point for the climate debate but it doesn't seem to be a focal point
for political action."
 But as officials meet in the German city of Bonn from June 1-11 to
lay more groundwork for the Paris summit, the United Nations says 2C
is still within reach.
Christiana Figueres, the U.N.'s top climate change official,
acknowledges that national plans for emissions curbs - the building
blocks for the Paris accord - won't be enough for 2C.
But she says new mechanisms for future rounds of pledges, perhaps in
2025 and 2030, can hit the 2C mark. "You don't run a marathon with
one step," said Figueres.
She says governments need to change their attitudes towards a
low-carbon economy, based on clean energies such as wind or solar
power, that can boost economic growth, cut pollution and create
jobs.
TOTEMIC GOAL
The 2C cap has its roots in an Earth Summit in 1992, which pledged
to avoid undefined "dangerous" human interference with the climate
system.
Over time 2C became a totemic goal. It was first adopted by the
European Union in 1996, U.S. President Barack Obama accepted 2C in
2009 and it was formally declared as the organizing principle of
climate talks at a U.N. meeting in Mexico in 2010.
It is an ambitious cap. Temperatures have already risen by 0.85C
since 1880, when industrialization became widespread. U.N. studies
say that may already be causing irreversible changes, from a
meltdown of Greenland's ice to collapse of coral reefs.
The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) outlined
scenarios last year to stay below 2C that could require cuts in
global greenhouse gas emissions lasting decades, at rates of three
or even six percent a year.
 Such cuts would be unprecedented in modern history: neither the 2009
international recession nor the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union
cut economic activity enough to drive emissions down so fast, the
International Energy Agency says.
Cuts of that magnitude may require yet-to-be developed technologies
that could, for example, extract carbon dioxide from the air.
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"It will not be a piece of cake," said Hans Joachim Schellnhuber,
founding director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact
Research, who encouraged the EU to adopt the 2C goal and says it is
still achievable. "It would be perhaps comparable to what the
United States did in the Second World War - they changed their
economy to producing tanks rather than automobiles," he said.
On the other hand, blowing past 2C warming could shift the debate to
whether humanity can adapt to 3 or 4 degrees of warming - the
current trend for 2100.
Those advocating adaptation to a much hotter planet raise the
prospect of designing new drought- or flood-resistant crops,
building ever higher sea walls, or even encouraging migrations from
lands that can no longer support their populations.
Developing nations reject that talk. "Any increase beyond 2 degrees
is a death warrant for our countries," said Tony de Brum, foreign
minister of the Marshall Islands in the Pacific. He says rising seas
could wipe low-lying states off the map.
He said small island states could block a deal if Paris sets the
world on track for high levels of warming. About 100 developing
nations want an even more ambitious 1.5C ceiling.
FAILURE NOT AN OPTION
Some experts want alternatives to 2C. New ways of measuring success
could be concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, or
progress towards zero carbon emissions by 2050 or 2100.
Alternatively, the word "overshoot" - describing the long-taboo idea
that temperatures can exceed 2C and then fall again - may seep ever
more into the debate.
 Still, there are reasons for optimism that the Nov. 30-Dec. 11 Paris
summit will agree a global deal, succeeding the 1997 Kyoto Protocol
that set emissions cuts only for rich nations and avoiding the
embarrassing failure of a 2009 climate summit in Copenhagen.
They note that this time, China and the United States, the top
emitters, are cooperating for an accord. Corporations have joined in
the search for solutions, prices of solar and wind energy have
tumbled, and more development aid is on offer.
Political leaders, meanwhile, want to avoid any perceptions of
failure in Paris. "There is a Copenhagen syndrome," French Foreign
Minister Laurent Fabius said last week. "No world leaders want to
(go through) that again."
(Additional reporting by John Irish and Emmanuel Jarry in Paris;
editing by David Stamp)
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