Friday Climate Focus: Scientists Confirm We (Mostly) Know What To Do ...
... they also say we aren't doing it fast enough
Hi There!
Welcome to Edition #24 of Living In A Greenhouse!
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published a new climate assessment report earlier this week.
And this comes after a fortnight of negotiations among ~200 countries, a little haggling over roles played by carbon-removal technologies, and some more over who does what.
Wait, who IPCC?
Before we get into what the report was about, here’s what the IPCC is and does.
The IPCC’s first and foremost responsibility is to inform policymakers the latest science on climate change.
Every IPCC report is accompanied by a ‘summary for policymakers’ section, as was this but with slight controversy. More on this later.
For those that do not know: this newsletter and IPCC reports go a little ways back.
I started Living In A Greenhouse, after IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report was published back in August last year, largely because I was triggered by the media coverage around the report.
Not a lot has changed with our world or its climate, except that I may have become a bit more mellow since.
Here is the link to the first-ever edition on Living In A Greenhouse should you be interested: That Climate Change Report That You Might Have Possibly Read?
(Me going through a melee of emotions re-reading it).
Okay, I am ready to hear about the report.
The latest report is the third of four parts in the IPCC’s current assessment cycle.
The first aka ‘The Science Report’ was released in August 2021 and concluded that we have a short window to act before we push our climate into the danger zone
The second or ‘The Impact and Adaptations Report’ came out a couple of months ago in February 2022 (right after Putin’s invasion) documented damages at current levels of temperature rise (1.1°C), what’s to come and how we can adapt
The third and the latest one is the ‘The Mitigation Report’ that covers ways to cut or end emissions in every sector
A summary document that brings together all this information is expected later this year.
The reason IPCC reports are the gold standard is the strong science embedded into the process of drafting these reports, besides the fact that every country has weighed in (more on this too with the controversy, later).
What did this report say?
*Oversimplification incoming*
— We now have the options with the potential to reduce emissions by 2030, but we aren’t adopting them fast enough
— We need to remove carbon from the atmosphere to reach our climate goals; not just stop putting more carbon into the atmosphere
— We can cut a lot of emissions (40%-70% more compared to recent trends) if enough population change behaviours around diets, energy use, air travel etc.
(If you thought I was oversimplifying, here’s a more accurate and credible oversimplification)
Oh and that controversy around the Summary for Policymakers I was talking about earlier. It is 64 pages long. The total number of pages in the report is 2,913.
This is the same section that ~200 countries weighed in or in other words, haggled over.
It is also one of the shortest summaries in history. There is no direct implication because of that.
Except, the shorter the number of pages → the greater the political negotiation.
3-2-1 on the Report
It’s a ginormous report, and unless you are a policymaker, a researcher, or a climate scientist, it is unlikely that you will have the tenacity (or the inclination, if I was honest) to read it in its entirety.
Very respectfully …
But if you do have the time for that, please start with the technical summary (about a 145 pages only).
I have decided to borrow a template popularly used by the amazing (and the annoyingly young) James Clear and put together 3 Articles; 2 Tweets; and 1 Video to tell you what’s in the report.
3 Articles
Here are three curated pieces on the Report that I think captures the context effectively:
i. The Official Press Release - IPCC
ii. The mother of all breakdowns - In-depth Q&A - Carbon Brief
iii. One of my favourite dissections of the report (Part 1 of a few) - Debunking Demand by Amy Westervelt