A Hot, Fiery, Flooding Present and Future - the Latest Warning from the U.N. Climate Panel
The remedy is the same, cut vulnerability now and emissions now. Are we listening?
You may have heard there's a climate science report out.
It will generate a thousand stories and messages, in every language on the planet.
Most will center on external interpretations and agendas because the findings are not new. This U.N.-chartered Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in its sixth comprehensive assessment of global warming science since it was created in 1988, is charged only with reviewing published research. And the panel is not allowed to offer policy prescriptions.
The core conclusions are plenty stark enough and need no embellishment. Go to the I.P.C.C.'s list of headline statements for key takeaways but here are three distilled points:
From "fire weather" to hurricane strength, heat waves to deluges, melting ice to searing drought, much of what has been unfolding around the planet is already, to a growing extent, intensified by the climate-altering power of hundreds of billions of tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide and other pollutants emitted so far as a consequence of humanity's "great acceleration" of industrial development.
Because of the long life of CO₂ and heat already banked in the oceans and other factors, centuries lie ahead with rising temperatures, rising seas and a dangerous melange of extreme events, but the pace and the odds of deeply disruptive worst-case outcomes are still a function of humanity's decisions, or continuing indecision, around stopping the growth of our heat-trapping carbon footprint in the atmosphere.
In theory, there's still time to stop dangerous warming altogether, and to forestall the worst impacts on people and the world's ecosystems if emissions can be brought down from today's 40-billion-tons-plus a year (and rising) to a net of zero.
That last point remains key. Every step toward emissions reduction is a step toward a safer relationship with climate in the decades ahead, including holding at bay potential deeply destabilizing abrupt or compounded changes - the "monsters behind the door," to use an apt old phrase from Princeton scientist Steve Pacala.
But that's where this report, “Climate Change 2021 - The Physical Science Basis,” leaves off. Unfortunately, the antiquated architecture of the panel, established decades ago, means two crucial additional parts of this assessment - on warming impacts, vulnerabilities and adaptation options and ways to mitigate warming - won't be out until next February and March, and a final synthesis report comes in September 2022...
And that's what's most urgently needed.
Click back to two other periodic United Nations products - the latest reports on the glaring global "Emissions Gap" and "Adaptation Gap" - and you'll see the deep hollowness behind many of the pledges by the nations that have spent the last century thriving on a fossil fueled energy diet. (Keep in mind there are no teeth in the 2015 Paris Agreement and the foundational 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change that it builds on.)
I created three slides that make these points below but do click to the reports at the preceding links. Note, particularly, the enormous risk reduction that can come (the blue curve in the first slide) through boosting societies' capacity to adapt to change.
Read these posts for more on adaptation capacity and vulnerability reduction as prime imperatives with quick payoffs:
Behind Global "Climate Emergency" Rhetoric, Solvable Vulnerability Emergencies Abound - Rich-world climate impacts - explosive wildfires, deadly urban floods and heat domes - are terrible. But this phrase obscures a profound vulnerability divide among and within countries.
Study Finds Global Surge of Flood Exposure is from Population Shifts Far More than Climate Change - Too often, rising climate risk is conflated with rising CO2. That takes the heat off national and local leaders who can cut drivers of risk on the ground now.
Here's a deeper look at what this newest "physical-science basis" summary offers.
Like a photograph coming into focus, causes and consequences of climate change that were only hinted at a decade or two ago have sharpened markedly. The emerging clarity comes from a mix of steadily improving computer power and model sophistication and increases in the amount of evidence revealing past climate dynamics. See here how more time and analysis has only reinforced a 1999 finding by the climate scientist Michael E. Mann and others showing the unique nature of Earth's current hot spike:
Read a fresh commentary by Mann in Time Magazine on the new report and his old finding.
But the emerging clarity has come mostly, and sadly in a way, from all the additional observations of change in these wasted decades of indecision. The “large-scale geophysical experiment” that the scientist Roger Revelle described in the 1950s has had so much time to play out that more signals have emerged.
Evidence of profound challenges to human societies from unabated emissions abound in this report, including that “global temperatures have risen faster since 1970 than in any other 50-year period over at least the last 2,000 years (high confidence)” and “global mean sea level has risen faster since 1900 than over any preceding century in at least the last 3,000 years (high confidence).”
There’s new detail about links between global warming from humanity’s surging emissions and the extreme weather events unfolding around the world - particularly heat.
And the latest climate simulations show a mix of inevitability and opportunity - that future warming remains mostly a function of emissions yet to come and centuries of future sea-level rise are locked in but the pace can be greatly slowed, along with odds of disruptive acceleration.
There's a touch of good news in one finding - that the capacity of oceans and terrestrial ecosystems to absorb a significant fraction of human-generated carbon dioxide is, for now, not diminishing:
So what should the world do with the insights in this new report?
Well, obviously there's a profound obligation, if anyone cares about cutting risk facing today's most vulnerable communities and boosting predictability and prosperity in the decades to come, the world needs to fill those glaring gaps.
Greta Thunberg, the face of the climate future, put it well on Twitter today:
"The new IPCC report contains no real surprises. It confirms what we already know from thousands previous studies and reports - that we are in an emergency. It’s a solid (but cautious) summary of the current best available scienceIt is up to us to be brave and take decisions based on the scientific evidence provided in these reports. We can still avoid the worst consequences, but not if we continue like today, and not without treating the crisis like a crisis."
I'd like to say this time will be different. This report holds thousands of pages of fresh insights and observations. Particularly valuable are the focused reports on cities and world regions.
There's even a new interactive climate atlas helping any country or community examine data pointing to observed and projected climate changes. I try to do a followup piece here exploring that tool and others. It relates neatly to the new Cloud to Street Global Flood Database, for instance. The eventual adaptation and mitigation reports of this sixth assessment will help, too.
I don't think the climate crisis will be "incremental forever," as the great climate scientist Jerry D. Mahlman told me in 2000.
I loved seeing this in a Twitter thread last night from Kate Marvel, a climate modeler at Columbia and NASA who was not a report author:
"As a climate scientist, I’d like you to know: I don’t have hope. I have something better: certainty. We know exactly what’s causing climate change. We can absolutely 1) avoid the worst and 2) build a better world in the process.... [I]f you live in a democracy, please call your representatives and tell them how much a livable climate matters to you. If you’re in the US, you can call the Senate at (202) 224-3121.
I understand the frustration. I get the despair and the anxiety. No one is saying this is going to be easy. But it is possible. The biggest uncertainty by FAR in climate projections is what humans we’ll do. Let’s get to work.
But the societal and systemic hurdles are enormous. (Read about "social inertia" and the climate challenge for starters; then read the vital cold-shower 2018 Resources for the Future report up-ending the idea we're on a fast path to a post-carbon energy transition.) It's no surprise that this is the sixth time this Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning international volunteer body of hundreds of scientists from a host of disciplines has produced a comprehensive review of climate science, and emissions and temperatures have only risen.
In interviews with half a dozen report authors yesterday, I could feel their frustration in having to constrain the writing to objective statements under the climate panel's charter, which calls for policy relevant, but policy neutral, content.
But they, too, remain largely hopeful. Ko Barrett, who is both a vice chair of the I.P.C.C. Sixth Assessment and a senior climate adviser to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said this to journalists on Sunday:
"It is still possible to forestall many of the most dire impacts. But it really requires unprecedented transformational change, rapid and immediate reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050. But the idea that there is still a pathway forward, I think is is a point that should give us some hope. Also, I'll just comment as a citizen that I see many governments around the world making pledges to take stronger action. I see segments of society who are using the science to spur advocacy for stronger action in particular. I've been on a number of panels with youth who are just strongly supportive of using the science to drive action."
Keep these thoughts in mind as you navigate the messaging this week and beyond.
You’ll see dozens of leaders, campaigners, scientists and communities at risk use the report findings to “boost ambition” in the November round of climate-treaty talks in Glasgow aimed at breaking fossil-fueled inertia and accelerating a clean-energy transition to slow warming. Their task remains astonishingly hard, and not just because of the Exxons of the world. China’s Communist elite hasn’t vaulted that vast country to the top of the global emitters list because of fossil-industry lies.
You’ll see professional naysayers like Bjorn Lomborg repeat their relaxing messages centered on data showing, accurately, that - so far - we’re doing just fine even with some dramatic and tragic epic floods and heat domes. See Lomborg’s latest Wall Street Journal piece, drawing on a new Lancet study tallying how dropping global deaths from cold far outweigh rising heat fatalities.
He’s right that “climate change doesn’t cause all disasters,” as the headline put it. But he’s dangerously wrong to propose the world can skate along with some slight nudge to current climate, economic, energy and development policies.
With that in mind, I'll offer some closing perspectives on this process from Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, who was the vice chairman of the climate panel's Fifth Assessment Report, released in 2013, and is a longtime climate researcher at the University of Louvain in Belgium.
He came up with a solid analogy for this climate diagnosis and society's deafness:
"Basically, it's a little bit like an Academy of Medicine who is looking at the sick patient and and refining its diagnosis in every bulletin and the patient is in a way addicted to a certain substance and is not doesn't want to change his behavior.
And the Academy of Medicine is describing the symptoms of the patient and an increasing fever, and is describing the different organs that might fail if the fever goes higher and higher.
In every report of the Academy of Medicine the understanding is better. And the attribution of the different symptoms and the different difficulties the patient is starting to have is better and better because the techniques to investigate the health of that patient are progressing. But the fever is progressing as well.
So the symptoms become clearer and clearer. And still, the patient doesn't want to to listen, in part because those who are selling the substance he is addicted to, named carbon, don't want to stop selling that substance. And those people are sometimes trying to confuse the message."
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