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The IPCC has been successful at building its scientific authority, but it will require institutional reform for staying relevant to new and changing political contexts. Exploring a range of alternative future pathways for the IPCC can help guide crucial decisions about redefining its purpose.

The 1.5°C target is now widely considered as the maximum acceptable limit for global warming. However, it is at once recent and, as it appears increasingly unreachable, already almost obsolete. Adopted as an aspirational target in the Paris Agreement in 2015, the 1.5°C objective originated with a political impetus within UNFCCC negotiations. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) endorsed this policy‐driven target when it produced the Special Report on 1.5°C. This article highlights the continuity of the history of the 1.5°C target with that of the 2°C target, but also the differences between the two. Because the 1.5°C target considerably raises the bar on mitigation efforts, it exacerbates political tensions and ambiguities that were already latent in the 2°C target. This article retraces the emergence of the 1.5°C in diplomatic negotiations, the preparation of the IPCC Special report on 1.5°C, and the new kinds of debates they provoked among climate scientists and experts. To explain how an unreachable target became the reference for climate action, we analyze the “political calibration” of climate science and politics, which can also be described as a codependency between climate science and politics. This article is categorized under:Integrated Assessment of Climate Change > Integrated Assessment ModelingClimate, History, Society, Culture > World Historical PerspectivesAssessing Impacts of Climate Change > Evaluating Future Impacts of Climate Change A sign held during a Fridays for Futuredemonstration. The 1.5°C target has come to embody the urgency of climateactions and its contradictions.

•This paper analyses the crisis of photovoltaic support schemes in France in 2010.•It gives a detailed account of the market and political effects of feed-in tariffs for PV.•The French case is an extreme example of the turbulences of FIT-driven PV deployment.•The regulation of FITs for PV relies on market expertise and political compromises.•These are not given and need to take into account the dynamic effects of FITs.