What chance do you think that the Powers-that-were are now going to do what they have not in the past quarter-century? As if it were now going to make a difference!
World’s
Scientists Warn: We Have ‘High Confidence’ In The ‘Irreversible
Impacts’ Of Climate Inaction
Joe Romm
2
November, 2014
Humanity’s
choice (via IPCC): Aggressive climate action ASAP (left figure)
minimizes future warming and costs a mere 0.06% of annual growth.
Continued inaction (right figure) results in catastrophic and
irreversible levels of warming, 9°F over much of U.S. and world.
The
world’s top scientists and governments have issued their bluntest
plea yet to the world: Slash carbon pollution now (at a very low
cost) or risk “severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for
people and ecosystems.” Scientists have “high confidence” these
devastating impacts occur “even with adaptation” — if we keep
doing little or nothing.
On
Sunday, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
released the “synthesis”
report of
their fifth full scientific climate assessment since 1990. More than
100 governments have signed off line by line on this review of more
than 30,000 studies on climate science, impacts, and solutions.
Like
every recent IPCC report, it is cautious to a fault — as you would
expect from “its consensus structure, which tends to produce a
lowest common denominator on which a large number of scientists can
agree,” as one climatologist explained to
the New York Times. And that “lowest common denominator” is
brought to an even blander and lower level in the summary reports
since they need to end up with language that satisfies every member
government.
The
authors clearly understand this is the last time they have a serious
shot at influencing the world’s major governments while we still
have a plausible chance of stabilizing at non-catastrophic levels.
IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri said
this report will
“provide the roadmap by which policymakers will hopefully find
their way to a global agreement to finally reverse course on climate
change.” That global agreement is supposed to be achieved over the
next year and finalized at the December 2015 international climate
talks in Paris.
And
yet, as conservative as the process is, this final synthesis is still
incredibly alarming — while at the same time it is terrifically
hopeful.
How
hopeful? The world’s top scientists and governments make clear for
the umpteenth time that the cost of action is relatively trivial:
“Mitigation scenarios that are likely to
limit warming to below 2°C” entail “an annualized reduction of
consumption growth by 0.04 to 0.14 (median: 0.06) percentage points
over the century relative to annualized consumption growth in the
baseline that is between 1.6 percent and 3 percent per year (high
confidence).”
Translation:
The cost of even the most aggressive action — the kind needed to
stave off irreversible disaster — is so low that it would not
noticeably change the growth curve of the world economy this century.
With high confidence, we would be reducing annual consumption growth
from, say, 2.4 percent per year down to “only” a growth level of
2.34 percent per year.
How
bad can it get if we won’t devote that tiny fraction of the world’s
wealth to action? The IPCC already explained that in the science
report from last fall (see “Alarming
IPCC Prognosis:
9°F Warming For U.S., Faster Sea Rise, More Extreme Weather,
Permafrost Collapse”). And they expanded on that in the impacts
report (see “Climate
PanelWarns
World Faces ‘Breakdown Of Food Systems’ And More Violent
Conflict”).
The
synthesis report ties it all together:
In most scenarios without additional mitigation efforts … warming is more likely than not to exceed 4°C [7°F] above pre-industrial levels by 2100. The risks associated with temperatures at or above 4°C include substantial species extinction, global and regional food insecurity, consequential constraints on common human activities, and limited potential for adaptation in some cases (high confidence).
Translation:
There is high confidence that if we keep doing little or nothing [the
RCP8.5 case], we will create a post-apocalyptic “hunger
games”
world beyond adaptation.
Ever
cautious, the IPCC euphemistically writes of “consequential
constraints on common human activities.” Elsewhere they explain
that “by 2100 for RCP8.5, the combination of high temperature and
humidity in some areas for parts of the year is expected to
compromise common human activities, including growing food and
working outdoors (high
confidence).”
Translation:
We are at risk of making large parts of the planet’s currently
arable and populated land virtually uninhabitable for much of the
year — and irreversibly so for hundreds of years.
Indeed,
the report makes clear that future generations can’t plausibly undo
whatever we are too greedy and shortsighted to prevent through
immediate action. And as bad as the impacts described in this report
are, things will be even worse after 2100 in every case but the one
where we aggressively act ASAP to stabilize at 2°C total warming.
And
remember, this is a super-cautious, consensus-based, “lowest common
denominator” report. The Washington Post has an excellent
piece on
the inherently conservative nature of these reports and why they
“often underestimate the severity of global warming.”
So
things are probably going to be much, much worse for our children and
grandchildren and future generations if we fail to act. Do we really
want to find out just how much worse things could be?
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