Avoiding climate chaos means ‘unprecedented’ change — UN report

INCHEON, South Korea: The UN’s 195-nation climate science body plunged deep into overtime yesterday to finalise a report outlining stark options – all requiring a global makeover of unprecedented scale – for avoiding climate chaos.

Working through the night, the closed-door huddle in rain-soaked Incheon, South Korea, was to convene a plenary later in the day to hammer through a ‘Summary for Policymakers.’

Can humanity cap global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius? What will it take and how much will it cost? Would climate impacts be significantly less severe than in a 2 degrees Celsius world?

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was tasked with these questions by the framers of the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement, which calls for halting the rise in temperatures to ‘well below’ 2 degrees Celsius – and 1.5 degrees Celsius if possible.

That aspirational goal – tacked on to the treaty at the last minute – caught climate scientists offguard.

“Our understanding of 1.5 degrees Celsius was very limited, all but two or three of the models we had then were based on a 2 degrees Celsius target,” said Henri Waisman, a senior researcher at the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations in Paris, and one of the report’s 86 authors.

Based on more than 6,000 peerreviewed studies, the 20-page bombshell will make for grim reading when it is released on tomorrow.

“Leaders will have nowhere to hide once this report comes out,” said Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace International, and an observer at the talks.

At current rates of greenhouse gas emissions, Earth will zoom past the 1.5 degrees Celsius signpost around 2040, and as early as 2030.

After only one degree of warming, the world has seen deadly storms engorged by rising seas and a crescendo of heatwaves, drought, flooding and wild fires made more intense by climate change.

Without a radical course change, we are headed for an unliveable 3 degrees Celsius or 4 degrees Celsius hike.

And yet, humanity has avoided action for so long that any pathway to a climate-safe world involves wrenching economic and social change ‘unprecedented in terms of scale,’ the report said.

“Some people say the 1.5 degrees Celsius target is impossible,” said Stephen Cornelius, WWF-UK’s chief adviser for climate change, and a former IPCC negotiator.

“But the difference between possible and impossible is political leadership.”

The report is set to lay out four scenarios that could result in Earth’s average surface temperature stabilising at 1.5 degree Celcius.

The most ambitious – dubbed the ‘low energy scenario’ – would see a radical drawdown in energy consumption coupled with a rapid shift away from fossil fuels and a swift decline in CO2 emissions starting in 2020.

It would not require a temporary ‘overshoot’ of the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold, and does not depend on sucking vast quantities of CO2 out of the air, known as carbon dioxide removal, or ‘negative emissions.’

A second pathway emphasises the need for changing our consumption patterns – eating less meat, travelling less, giving up cars, etc – along with an overhaul of agricultural and land-use practices, including the protection of forests. The final scenario compensates for a ‘business-asusual’ economy and lifestyle by allowing a large overshoot of the 1.5 degrees Celsius target.

It also calls for burning a lot of biofuels and capturing the emitted CO2, a system known by its acronym, BECCS.

Indeed, an area twice the size of India would have to be planted in biofuel crops. This ‘P4’ plan also assumes that some 1200 billion tonnes of CO2 – 30 years’ worth of emissions at current rate – will be socked away underground.