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The
Guardian is a very dutiful apologist of the IPCC these days. Is any of this worth the paper it's not printed on?
IPCC
climate change report calls for urgent action to phase out fossil
fuels - live
UN’s
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says coal-fired electricity
should end by 2050 if we are to limit global warming rises to 1.5C
8
October, 2018
Still in Australia,
which I earlier noted was reportedly among nations to push back on
elements of the report about a coal phase out (the government denies
this):
Prime Minister Scott Morrison – under fire for having recently abandoned a policy to cut emissions from electricity –
said his government would “look at the report carefully” but claimed
“only a year ago the same report said that the policies Australia has
was right on the money”.
It
isn’t clear which report he was referring to - the special report is a
one off and the IPCC last published a major assessment in 2013/14.
Morrison went on to say Australia was responsible for a little more than
1% of global emissions.
“There
are a lot bigger players than us out there... emissions per capita in
Australia are at their lowest level for decades... but at the end of the
day we want to ensure electricity prices are lower.”
Australia,
of course, is heavily reliant on coal, which the report says would
basically need to be finished as an energy source by mid-century.
Opposition
leader Bill Shorten – according to opinion polls, favoured to take
power at an election next year – said fossil fuels would not disappear
but he wanted to see more renewable energy. He has promised it would
deliver 50% of electricity by 2030, up from about 20% today.
There’s
an interesting part of the report which relates to coral, and
specifically the large-scale bleaching events which hit the Great
Barrier Reef, off Australia’s north east coast, in recent years.
The bleaching events were predicted, but came far sooner than expected, leading the report to conclude the research community had possibly underestimated the impact of global warming on coral.
Adam Morton reports here that the difference between a rise of 1.5C instead of 2C is a matter of survival for the Great Barrier Reef.
Today’s report found that coral reefs were likely to decline between 70% and 90% if the temperature increased to 1.5C.
Dire enough, to be sure, but if global warming reaches 2C, more than 99% of coral reefs were projected to decline.
“Going to 2 degrees and above gets to a point where corals can no longer grow back, or you have annual bleaching events,” said Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, a coordinating lead author on the report and a coral reefs expert with the University of Queensland.
“On
the other hand, at 1.5 degrees Celsius there’s still significant areas
which are not heating up or not exposed to the same levels of stress
such that they would lose coral, and so we’re fairly confident that we
would have parts of those ecosystems remaining.”
I am keeping one ear on the press conference as I bring you the international reaction to this report.
The panel has just been asked if the fossil fuel industry was represented.
Yes, in a word - the plenary sessions included observer organisations, and “they were in the room”.
Outside the press conference, the interim chief executive of the World Coal Association, Katie Warrick, tells us they believe there is still a future for coal.
“While we are still reviewing the draft, the World Coal Association believes that any credible pathway to meeting the 1.5C scenario must focus on emissions rather than fuel. That is why [carbon capture and storage] is so vital.Forecasts from the [International Energy Agency] and other credible experts continue to see a role for coal for the foreseeable future. Going into COP24, we will be campaigning for greater action on all low emissions technologies including CCS.”
The report has said fossil fuels, in particular coal, must be phased out. It’s probably a good moment for me to re-up this quote from the panel earlier:
“All
options need to be exercised... We can make choices about how much of
each option we use... but the idea you can leave anything out is
impossible.”
And this:
Q: How soon do coal, oil, and natural gas need to be phased out entirely?
IPCC: "The report is quite clear ... all pathways require quite significant changes in the pattern of fossil fuel use. ... Coal will have to be reduced very, very substantially by mid-century."
The IPCC report is a wake-up call for slumbering world leaders,” says Andrew Steer, President & CEO, World Resources Institute.
“The
difference in impacts between 1.5 and 2C of warming is large, and
potentially game changing. And, the devastation that would come with
today’s 3-4C trajectory would be vastly greater. Each tenth of a degree
matters – and tragically it’s the poor who will be most affected.”
The consequences of #climate change in a 2˚C world are far greater than with 1.5˚C of warming. But the world is far off track from either. ow.ly/bqNy30m8ugT #SR15 #IPCC
So is the 1.5C target feasible? Thats the big early question.
Professor
Piers Forster from the University of Leeds is one of the lead authors
of the Special Report chapter that looks at the different “pathways”
that governments could take. He tells me he is “exhausted but elated”
the report was finished on time (one of the sessions went for 30 hours
straight).
Forster
says the report “shows that limiting warming to 1.5C is barely feasible
and every year we delay the window of feasibility halves. Nevertheless,
if we were to succeed, we go on to show that benefits across society
will be huge and the world will be all the richer for it. It’s a battle
worth winning.”
Here’s
something to understand. The report sets out four different “pathways”
that governments could choose. As one of the IPCC co-chairs Jim Skea
says, “it’s possible within the laws of physics and chemistry… it’s up
to the governments to decide that last step of feasibility.”
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