Major IPCC Report Tomorrow


The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will release its latest major report tomorrow in the runup to the November, COP-26 climate summit in Glasgow. It's the first major assessment since 2013.  The report will consist of a "short" 40-page "Summary for Policymakers."

While the report is embargoed, the World Economic Forum has a loose preview of what to expect.  The report will stress what we already see on our newscasts every evening - the world is heating up faster than we ever expected.

The IPCC report is expected to bring forward when scientists expect to reach 1.5C to the mid-2030s, at which point tipping points such as lose of artic sea ice, larger-scale die-offs of coral reefs, and thawing of the methane-rich permafrost become much more likely.

The short and long-term effects of a doubling of greenhouse gases.

Recent research predicts the increase in global average temperature with a doubling of CO2 in the air to between 2.6-4.5C. The difference between 1.5C short term, and between 2.6C and 4.5C longer term may seem small at first glance. However, the difference between 1.5C, 2C, and 3C is the difference between average droughts lasting two, four or 10 months per year, and the difference between 6%, 18% or 68% (for an increase to 4.5C) means invertebrates globally losing of their habitat. These longer-term trends are in addition to the extreme weather we have witnessed across Europe and the US over the past two months.

The IPCC is expected to report that we can still avert catastrophe but it will take a massive, short-term cut in greenhouse gas emissions. 

The important thing to remember is that, for generations to come, the world today is the best case scenario.  Even if we eliminate fossil fuels tomorrow, the conditions we'll endure for decades, possibly centuries to come, are expected to be even more brutal. What we're dealing with now isn't some fluke, an aberration, it's our new normal - for today at least.

In keeping with the tradition of decades of Liberal and Conservative regimes, our government will endlessly repeat how it is absolutely committed to slashing greenhouse gas emissions soon, like within a decade, somehow, maybe.



Comments

  1. Owen GrayAugust 8, 2021 at 12:08 PM

    Data isn't the problem, Mound. It's political will.

    ReplyDelete
  2. The Disaffected LibAugust 8, 2021 at 12:18 PM

    True enough, Owen, yet it has become a steadily decreasing commodity. I do sometimes wonder if we have a dangerous collapse of courage.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Northern PoVAugust 9, 2021 at 7:19 AM

    I haven't had time to read any details. I have seen the tiny, well down the page, headlines about this big story, one that should be dominating our public discourse.

    And, after being curated by the world's various governments, past IPCC reports have been credibly accused of cherry-picking the best case scenario.

    Perhaps our aspirational goals should be replaced by 'respirational goals'.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Northern PoVAugust 9, 2021 at 8:24 AM

      OK, the Guardian did the story justice. And it is at the top of the NYT & WaPo & CBC.

      I was referring to G&M and Nat Post/Sun in my comments. Both yellow rags of fossil fuels it seems.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Cognoscenti Syndrome

  There is a group of people I think of as the Cognoscenti, people who are well educated, very informed and of rapidly diminishing relevance. Their ranks include writers such as Chris Hedges and Glen Greenwald. These are people who have honed an almost Puritanical value system, readily finding fault in any direction. They are scathing in their attacks on Republicans and Democrats alike to the point where they become nihilists. They don't endorse. They prescribe. This is where they fail. They're unable to advocate for anything that might resonate with the public whose interests they argue are being trammeled. Donald Trump was bad but Joe Biden is scarcely better. This is where their elitism comes in.  74 million may have voted for Trump but, hey, they didn't know any better. The mob that stormed the Capitol. They were just victims of the system venting their frustrations. All the racism, bigotry, xenophobia, misogyny, white nationalism - inevitable side effects of their oppr...
Read more

The Gun We Point at Our Own Heads

Image
  If you're sitting at a table and there's a loaded pistol in front of you, do you pick it up and point it at your own head?  Probably not, unless something has gone terribly, terribly wrong. How would you feel if someone else was holding that pistol to your head? But there is a pistol pointed at our heads and, unless we do something about it, we're goners. It's not a Glock. It's fossil fuels and the industry is slowly squeezing the trigger. Proven fossil fuel reserves are sufficient to generate 3.5 trillion tons of greenhouse gas emissions .  Russia and the United States each have massive reserves of fossil energy sufficient to push humanity through the 1.5C heating limit, sometimes called the "carbon budget."  I have it on reliable authority that Washington and the Kremlin aren't getting along very well these days. After all, if you won't hold the line on nuclear proliferation, you might not be inclined to voluntarily give up a major source of na...
Read more

Who Asks "Why?"

Every time there's a conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians, all we hear is 'why?'  Why, as in, whose fault is this? It's easier to affix blame if you can truncate the event. Pick a convenient start date, something recent. In this case we'll make it either the Israeli eviction of Arabs from Jerusalem or the scuffle that took place outside the mosque in response. If those don't work, let's go for Hamas launching unguided rockets into Israel. That's even better because it tags Hamas with the blame. The nice thing about this approach is you can just keep using it. It goes on and on, just as it has for the past half-century since the '67 war. You can even date this whole mess to the beginning of the occupation of the Palestinian territories. The Israelis are said to have called these periodic wars, "mowing the lawn." The idea is that, every now and then, you have to take these Arabs to the woodshed. And then you keep your powder dry unt...
Read more