IPCC Synthesis Report

(Charts from Yale Climate Connections summary of the IPCC AR6 synthesis report)

On Monday, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released the final “Synthesis” portion of this round of its assessment reports.

This report doesn’t lay out more scientific information. That’s what earlier reports in the assessment did. This report pulls together the science in the earlier reports from this assessment and says what we need to do, with how much urgency.

If you don’t want to read the whole report directly and want a summary softened for general public, click here for the Guardian’s summary.

If you are made of sterner stuff and want more substantive information, click here for the Yale Climate Connections summary.

The Guardian article says it “boiled down to one message: act now, or it will be too late.”

During the day, I listened to and read interviews with people who were involved in producing the report. They went to great pains to say we have the technologies we need to pivot, dramatically reduce emissions and limit climate change.

For the most part, they tried hard to offer an upbeat tone. I couldn’t help but remember the television interview scene from the movie Don’t Look Up. Keep it cheerful and upbeat or get taken off the air. The Guardian’s article repeats what most news outlets were saying, that going beyond 1.5 degrees would lead to irreversible damage.

But at one point a BBC Radio 4 interviewer asked one of the scientists whether, if we put in the concentrated effort necessary to hold global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, that would mean we can reverse the damage done so far and restore the world to the way it was.

The scientist kept a perky, optimistic tone of voice, but without hesitation said no. What’s gone is gone and won’t come back.

The scientist went on to talk about the 1.5 degree threshold as the point beyond which the damage would become significantly harder to cope with, but we already have some damage that cannot be undone.

The farther we let global warming run, the worse everything gets.

Scientists were asked about oil and gas. Their answers were brief, direct and delivered flatly (no hype). The oil and gas projects already producing will generate additional emissions budgeted in the report. There is no margin for more. Any new oil and gas projects at all (such as the Willow project just approved for Alaska) are reckless and foolish. For the sake of the world, the best outcome in oil and gas would be for all new projects in the industry to become stranded assets.

What’s Next?

Governments are generally not willing to do the right thing if it would make big business or pork barrel politics unhappy. We see this over and over about everything from public health to refugees to climate change. For global warming, it doesn’t seem to matter that doing the right thing on an intense “moonshot” timeline (doing it all in just a few years) is projected by think tanks to actually turn out better economically than blundering ahead the way we’re going.

There are exceptions to this rule about governments doing the wrong thing to please powerful interests. So far climate change is not the full-tilt exception to the rule that it needs to be.

Governments can’t fully solve climate change anyway. They can do a lot if they choose to, but they aren’t enough. Ultimately the rise of global temperatures can only be halted if enough people live in ways that are much more kind to Mother Earth.

My wife and I could do more than we’re doing so far. Like most Britons, we hardly ever use a dryer for our laundry, hanging it up to dry instead. We only throw away what we can’t compost or send for recycling. We installed solar power. We made our garden more friendly for pollinators and more productive. We got a water butt (rain barrel) to water the garden. We still drive cars with combustion engines, but we work from home and drive a fraction of the miles we used to drive. My wife is vegetarian with occasional lapses to pescatarian (vegetarian plus a little seafood). My body said no when I tried to go vegetarian, but I eat less meat than I did when I moved to the UK several years ago.

These changes didn’t happen all at once. They came one at a time. We keep whittling away at our environmental footprint.

Here’s the main point of that personal example. We all have a choice. We can look at the climate change problem, feel hopelessly overwhelmed and choose to do nothing. If too many of us do that, we are definitely cooked.

Or we can each whittle away at it to the extent that we can. If you’re struggling to get by from one day to the next, you don’t have anything left to put toward it. But if enough of us who have the wherewithal actually do whittle away at our environmental footprint, it all adds up. We need the sum of many individual changes in the direction of less global warming. When enough of the population takes a particular path, people also eventually drag governments along with them.

IPCC basically says it’s now or never. Yale Climate Connections notes: “The bleakness of the IPCC’s new assessment is leavened by new detail on how implementing prompt emissions cuts could help pull the world back from the brink and do so well within our own time.”

IPCC gave us a blueprint. Now it’s up to us.