IPCC WGIII (posted April 7; updated April 10)

Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change

The Working Group III report provides an updated global assessment of climate change mitigation progress and pledges, and examines the sources of global emissions. It explains developments in emission reduction and mitigation efforts, assessing the impact of national climate pledges in relation to long-term emissions goals.

'It is time to stop burning our planet'. The Ecologist. Apr.7, 2022.

.... "We used to chant “1.5, we might survive” - 1.5 was already a compromise for frontline communities suffering the worst climate impacts. The IPCC’s WGII climate scientists told us only last month that breaching this guard-rail, even temporarily, could push us over a series of tipping points that would lead to uncontrollable warming.

"It would be grossly negligent for economists to ignore those warnings and propose inequitable mitigation plans that allow for an overshoot, as is now on the table with this new report."

Shortcomings of IPCC AR6 WGIII - Mitigation of Climate Change. Arctic News. Apr. 5, 2022.

********** added April 10 **********

 The Age of Climate Limits. Albert Bates. Apr. 10, 2022.

"Science has given us a three year deadline to end growth as we know it."

The IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) consists of contributions from each of the three IPCC Working Groups and a Synthesis Report, which integrates all the reports produced in the 10-year cycle. While “net-zero by 2050” is a slogan that gives everyone permission to slack off, the latest and final working group report released this week puts the challenge into sharper focus: carbon emissions must peak by 2025. We are three and one half years from the End of Growth. We then enter the long awaited Age of Limits. Will we do it? Former UNFCCC President Christiana Figueres sounds like she is scolding an unruly teenager:

I’m lacking words for this…. What is suicidal is our inability to take the decisions and enact the behavioral changes that we perfectly well can in order to align our planet with the Paris Agreement. That’s the problem. There is nothing new that any report can tell us about what we should be doing. The gap that we identified years ago is not closing; in fact, it’s enlarging. That’s the news. It’s tragic.

Scornful daddy António Guterres, UN secretary-general, said the kid was a “file of shame, cataloguing the empty pledges that put us firmly on track towards an unlivable world.”

Climate activists are sometimes depicted as dangerous radicals. But the truly dangerous radicals are the countries that are increasing the production of fossil fuels.

........

If Covid taught us anything, it was that the status quo is a frail construct. It can vanish in an instant, or at least over the course of a few weeks. This is what the people in Ukraine witnessed, at least one by a hail of machine gun fire as he bicycled to the grocery. It is what happened to those in Lismore and Byron Bay who saw their homes rain bombed underwater to the rooftops for the second time in a month, or to those who watched their lifetime possessions vanish in wildfires of scale and speed no one had imagined possible. The shock of sudden change is how a two-year (and soon to be longer) pandemic convinced so many to leave their professional careers and switch to a different life path rather than go back to what they had been doing before. We have been shaken from dreary normalcy and been made aware of how precarious the world of our making has become, and how we could be spending our days in more meaningful pursuits.

Many think the solution to climate change is public education. I don’t. I think people know. Most just don’t want to admit it, or do anything, unless they have to.

.....

The report could not have set the agenda any better.

If humanity still needs a climate strategy, I think these thousand scientists, finally reaching their difficult 150-hour marathon consensus in the early hours of Monday morning, provided it. Our effort must address the existential issue of our era: changing our cultural habits and deciding to live as if there will still be a tomorrow.

......

We could stop there, but if you are a glutton for punishment there is more. Here are some things the IPCC got wrong:

• “Unabated” coal must be “completely” phased out by 2050. The “U” word is inserted at the insistence of coal producers (Joe Manchin, N. Modi, V. Putin) who still believe “clean coal” is a real thing. Instead, all coal should be phased out by 2025.
• IPCC still forecasts that economic growth, coming on the back of ever growing energy supply, will continue into the indefinite future. There is little recognition of the caloric return of different energy types, EROIE, or rare mineral depletion — technocornucopian bias.
• The Carbon Budget. Going all the way back to AR-1, IPCC has followed the chimera of a carbon budget that would allow underdeveloping countries (India, Nigeria, etc) to make up for the lost ground stolen by the overdeveloped nations in the 19th century by continuing to emit — and grow emissions annually — long after everyone else is forced to curtail. Originally the budget was 450 ppm, but when it was realized that would take us to 3 to 5 degrees warming, it was cut to 350, and then replaced with the 2 degree goal. This report says “a significant but very small carbon budget remains” to limit warming to 1.5°. It says the path to limit warming to 1.5° is extremely narrow, therefore this small budget should be used only by hard-to-decarbonize sectors, like steel mills, maritime shipping and airlines. This is preposterous! Even if all emissions stopped tomorrow, Earth would continue to warm. The budget concept is based on the flawed premise that if India were given 20 more years of Russian coal and gas every Indian will be living like a Swede or Dane does today, driving a Tesla and wintering in Ibiza. This is dangerous nonsense and should have been discarded long ago. We are already over budget and building huge stockpiles of atmospheric of carbon that must be removed at unknowable expense.
• Natural climate solutions — biochar, carbon farming, agroforestry, land use changes and the like — are consistently undervalued (all can be cost negative, ie: profitable, if managed in a regenerative fashion) and excluded from the predictive models — while high tech solutions like BECCS, DACCS, and CCU are overvalued (they will cost trillions and rely on unremitting energy inputs) but included in the predictive models. The former consistently surprise by overperforming expectations. The latter consistently disappoint. And yet the IPCC refuses to admit it is betting its whole inheritance on the wrong horse.
• For instance, while the value of biochar for Carbon Dioxide Removal has been elevated from 1.4 GtCO2/y potential to 6.6 GtCO2/y, that number is almost entirely based upon soil applications, with a slight nod to animal feed and water filtration. As I pointed out in my formal critique a year ago when the IPCC invited me to be a reviewer, the non-agricultural applications for biochar have 10x the drawdown potential, profitability and speed of deployment. I offered BURN and its hundreds of current references, but that was not mentioned. Paul Hawkens’ Drawdown (2017) was referenced but his more accurate biochar recalculation in Regeneration (2020) was overlooked.
• A word search on “pets,” “dogs,” “cats,” and “ornamental fish” came up blank. The report estimates with high confidence that shifts to sustainable healthy diets have a “technical potential” to reduce emissions by 3.6 GtCO2e, with a range of 0.5 to 8 GtCO2e but says nothing about the carbon footprint of pets and pet food. Big blind spot. Creature comfort seems to be a taboo subject.
• IPCC forecasts nuclear will expand 70% above 2019 by 2030 and 305% by 2050. Besides being economic fantasy, this demonstrates the callous willingness of engineers to burn future children to produce light, heat, and steam. It is unconscionable.

Here is what they got right:

• Watching the breathtaking speed of the solar and wind build-out and price drop since the last report, the IPCC admitted it had gotten that wrong: “future energy transitions may occur more quickly than those in the past.”
• They also admit that nuclear energy and clean coal technology, the darlings of earlier reports, have been “slower than…anticipated.”
• It is beyond dispute now that reversing climate change will be far less expensive (and futile) than trying to live with it, or trying to tame nuclear fusion.
• “Decommissioning and reduced utilization of existing fossil fuel installations in the power sector as well as cancellation of new installations are required to align future CO2 emissions from the power sector with projections in these pathways.” Stranded investment must happen. Live with it, Joe Manchin, Marsha Blackburn and Charles Koch.
• “Bioenergy and BECCS are found to pose a risk to biodiversity, water, soil, air quality, resilience, livelihoods and food security.”
• Global CO2 emissions must peak “at the latest before 2025” and then fall to 48% below 2019 levels by 2030, then 84% below by 2050.
• The central impediment is not lack of solutions but human behavior, much of which is hard wired. What could expedite shifts would be “novel narratives” in the media and entertainment industry to “help to break away from the established values, discourses and the status quo.” For example: portray plant-based diets as healthy and natural; portray climate resisters as normal and climate polluters as regressive or evil (e.g.: Icelandic film: Woman at War).
• For the first time, there is a chapter on “demand-side,” including diets and consumption patterns. Strapline: sustainable food systems that provide healthy diets for all are within reach. Healthy habitats — rural, periurban, or urban — are within reach. There is a better world waiting.