On the Hook. IPCC - Extreme Weather for the Rest of Your Days.

"Climate change is happening, and people actually feel it. The report just provides scientific validation to the general public that, yes, what you feel is actually true."

Xuebin Zhang, climatologist with Environment Canada

That's your fate. It's everyone's fate. We are in an era of extreme weather and we're in for good. It's not going away. Not in your lifetime, not in your grandkids' either.  The question now is how much worse we choose to make it. On that score we do have a choice. Is it really a good idea to allow our elected petro-pimps and their fossil fuel allies to make that call for us and our grandkids?

With every extra mile of pipeline our prime minister puts in the ground en route to "tidewater" he's putting people in the ground, people who fall victim to extreme weather events.  Some will die. Many more will lose their livelihood. In one way or another everyone will be harmed - well, except those with the kind of money that can buy some respite.

Even the milquetoast Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, is finally calling a spade a spade. From The Guardian:

Only rapid and drastic reductions in greenhouse gases in this decade can prevent such climate breakdown, with every fraction of a degree of further heating likely to compound the accelerating effects, according to the International Panel on Climate Change, the world’s leading authority on climate science.

Today marks the release of the IPCC's sixth 'state of the climate' assessment since 1988. The only surprise is that anyone might find it surprising.

It's still possible to hold global heating to 1.5 degrees Celsius. It's still possible to avert climate catastrophe for some, generally speaking the same people who created this nightmare. Possible but not likely. 

You see we have an Achilles Heel, more than one in fact. They're named Trudeau and O'Toole, Kenney and Moe, even Horgan. These are the Petro-Pimps and they've been telling us for decades they're on board even as they squander billions we don't have on pipelines or do battle over carbon taxes in our highest court. There's a gag that describes these people: "Don't piss on my leg then tell me it's raining."

Even if the world manages to limit warming to 1.5C, some long-term impacts of warming already in train are likely to be inevitable and irreversible. These include sea level rises, the melting of Arctic ice, and the warming and acidification of the oceans. Drastic reductions in emissions can stave off worse climate change, according to IPCC scientists, but will not return the world to the more moderate weather patterns of the past.

Final Warning.

This report is likely to be the last report from the IPCC while there is still time to stay below 1.5C, added Joeri Rogelj, director of research at the Grantham Institute, Imperial College London, and an IPCC lead author. “This report shows the closer we can keep to 1.5C, the more desirable the climate we will be living in, and it shows we can stay within 1.5C but only just – only if we cut emissions in the next decade,” he said. “If we don’t, by the time of the next IPCC report at the end of this decade, 1.5C will be out the window.”

Define "we," Joeri. He's talking about what I call the "latitudinally advantaged." People from the temperate zones. White folks from countries that circle the Arctic. The same people who brought the world the Industrial Revolution. There are other people, mainly brown and black people, the latitudinally disadvantaged. These people live in tropical/equitorial regions - the Indian subcontinent, southeast Asia, the Caribbean and Central America. It's too late for them. Even if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases today there'll be no "more desirable climate" for them. They're screwed.

Full disclosure. I'm not fond of the IPCC. Their reports are consensus driven, negotiated, watered down. These reports, especially the projections, may sound dire but they've consistently been understated, unduly optimistic and quickly overtaken by events.

The Washington Post sums up the report:

Monday’s sprawling assessment states that there is no remaining scientific doubt that humans are fueling climate change. That much is “unequivocal.” The only real uncertainty that remains, its authors say, is whether the world can muster the will to stave off a darker future than the one it already has carved in stone.

The New York Times reports that even the best-possible outcomes are awful.

At 1.5 degrees of warming, scientists have found, the dangers grow considerably. Nearly 1 billion people worldwide could swelter in more frequent life-threatening heat waves. Hundreds of millions more would struggle for water because of severe droughts. Some animal and plant species alive today will be gone. Coral reefs, which sustain fisheries for large swaths of the globe, will suffer more frequent mass die-offs.

“We can expect a significant jump in extreme weather over the next 20 or 30 years,” said Piers Forster, a climate scientist at the University of Leeds and one of hundreds of international experts who helped write the report. “Things are unfortunately likely to get worse than they are today.”

The Globe & Mail offers up a suitably Bay Street take or "climate change lite."

The National Post has buried the story in small print at the very bottom of their web page beneath the important stories of the day, the Tokyo Olympics and the Bill Davis obit.  Like the Globe it's a distinctly anodyne treatment at best.

The National Observer goes where neither the Globe nor the Post dare to tread.

As the planet warms, the IPCC warns heat waves, droughts, cyclones, and heavy rain will all become more common, posing a direct threat to agriculture and human safety. Then there is Arctic sea ice, snow cover, and permafrost that is melting and contributing to sea level rise and methane leaking into the atmosphere, potentially representing a tipping point for the Earth’s climate.

Tipping points in climate science refer to a threshold that, when crossed, lock in major damage. Scientists are still developing better understandings of how tipping points work, but they essentially represent a minefield on the road to net-zero given the uncertainty. Carbon sinks turning into carbon emitters, like Canada’s managed forest, or Greenland rapidly losing more than 18 billion tonnes of ice contributing to sea level rise are just two potential examples.

The Observer gets into the other face of climate breakdown, natural feedback loops already in play. Tipping points now passed. Forest transformed from carbon sinks into carbon bombs. Tundra thawing, drying and burning, releasing CO2 and exposing the methane rich permafrost beneath. "A minefield on the road to net-zero" is as apt a description as I've heard.

Deutsche Welle calls out leaders very much like our own.

In 2015, world leaders pledged to limit warming by the end of the century to well below 2 C — ideally 1.5 C — in a global effort to avoid escalating catastrophes. But they are instead pursuing policies that put the planet on track for 3 C, according to German-based research group Climate Action Tracker.

While the 1.5 C target will be broached within a couple of decades, temperatures could be brought back below it by the end of the century under the report's most ambitious scenario for cutting pollution. As well as rapidly decarbonizing the global economy, it would involve sucking enormous amounts of CO2 out of the atmosphere. But the technology to do so is expensive, and there is little evidence to suggest it could work at the scales needed.

The Sydney Morning Herald is calling "bullshit" on decades of empty promises from western leaders.

Since the first assessment report (presciently dubbed FAR) in 1990 said, “the climate is warming, folks”, we’ve belched 1 trillion tonnes (1,000,000,000,000) of CO2 by burning fossil fuels and clearing land. It’s also 41 per cent of all the estimated emissions since 1750, so if it’s a pedal we’re hitting, it’s not the brake. Temperatures, particularly since the 1970s have been going one way, and the best climate models are doing an increasingly good job at matching observations.

...Remember, though, that 1.5 degrees and 2 degrees are both arbitrary. Look at Greece this week, Canada or California last month, or our home-fired Black Summer last year to get a glimpse of how juicing the climate is already raising the odds of extreme nasties. Heatwaves are one of them.

The Times of India, from one of those latitudinally disadvantaged countries directly in the worsening climate's path, perhaps couldn't spare a reporter to rummage through the IPCC summary. Either that or they didn't want to risk offending Modi.

Pakistan's Dawn news service added a little something to the basic story, a veiled reference to Wet Bulb 35. 

The 1.1°C warming already recorded has been enough to unleash disastrous weather. This year, heatwaves killed hundreds in the Pacific Northwest and smashed records around the world. Wildfires fuelled by heat and drought are sweeping away entire towns in the US West, releasing record carbon dioxide emissions from Siberian forests, and driving Greeks to flee their homes by ferry.

Further warming could mean that in some places, people could die just from going outside.

Pakistan has had a couple of Wet Bulb 35 events this year and further warming will only increase their frequency, intensity and duration, the Climate Trifecta.

The South China Morning Post has the story in its business section. SCMP's coverage includes a video of Iraqis sweltering under a 50 degree Celsius heatwave. Boy that sure looks hot.  No mention of China's coal-fired generating plants now in operation or under construction. 

The Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, is running the basic story with no reference to what lies in store for the Holy Land.  Ditto for the Jerusalem Post where the story is buried beneath more pressing accounts such as Covid-19, terrorism and Israel's newest shopping mall in the Judean Desert.

Over at Pravda there's more interest in the idea that Russia may turn its surface to air missile batteries in Syria to down Israeli strike fighters.  With Putin intent on opening the Arctic to oil and gas drilling, the IPCC report is a bit awkward.

The news service, Reuters, offers a dandy summary of leaders' reactions around the world from Guterres to BoJo to John Kerry.  Oddly enough the report is also in its business section.  My favourite quote comes from Jennifer Granholm, Biden's energy secretary: "The planet is on fire, and our hair should be on fire about this! We need to move faster to deploy, deploy, deploy clean energy and make our communities more resilient."

Lots of reports, alarms and dire warnings but haven't we seen these before. Again and again climate breakdown has been the lead story only to wind up flushed down the Memory Hole before the week is out.  Will this time be any different? Are we a "dollar short, day late" civilization?