Let’s talk about that IPCC Climate Report

“Ah shit, here we go again”

So. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (or the UN IPCC) released a new report, and it is, to put it lightly, not good. The press conference was held on August 9th, 2021, and there seemed to be pretty significant media coverage of it, at least in the news circles that I follow. And pretty much everything I saw was frightening, confusing, and scary. I’d like to think that I have a little bit more of an understanding of this kind of stuff than the average reporter, at least officially now that I’ve graduated with a degree in it, but I haven’t really looked at the nitty gritty of it myself. But I did look at some of the summaries, which you can read for yourself here, and I’ve got to say that, yeah, it’s pretty bad.

For some context, the IPCC has to release a major Assessment Report every few years, and this document that was just released, called the Working Group 1 Contribution, is a physical-science approach to climate change that’s going to be a part of the overall report when it’s finished. So, while this isn’t quite the whole picture, it’s a pretty big part of it. It looks at what’s happened, why it’s happened, and what’s likely to happen in the next decades. This is all based upon decades of observations, physical laws, knowledge of earth processes, computational models, and human experience, among hundreds of scientists working together to get some sort of answers as to what’s driving climate change and where it’s going to go. And based on all this study, the answer is, at least in their own words, the following; climate change in unequivocally caused by human factors and it’s going to get worse. We’re too far gone now to stop it now. We can’t go back again.

In more specific terms, what this means is that there is little to no evidence suggesting that current atmospheric warming is within natural variability, or primarily contributed to by natural forces. In fact, there’s significant evidence against the idea that climate change, as we know it now, is occurring naturally. And there is far, far more evidence pointing to a conclusion that we kind of already know; that the largest warming factor in climate change is increased levels of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere, and all that extra stuff is up there because we put it up there. Burning fossil fuels, cutting down forests, generally tearing up the earth, it’s all tied up now in human-induced climate change. But that’s not the part everybody cares about, because that’s old news. What’s new, on the other hand, is this notion of we can’t stop it now. But what does that actually mean?

So, in its most basic form, what the report is saying is that, unless we stop burning fossil fuels right now, the earth is guaranteed to heat up to at least 2 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels, and we can’t stop it. Even if we did stop emitting greenhouses gasses tomorrow, the Earth would keep warming up for the next couple of decades. And in the worst case scenarios, where we just keep emitting business-as-usual? We get 4, 6, 8, 10 or more degrees of warming. Worldwide. For the foreseeable future. What makes this report so terrifying is that we are on track, now, to warm up regardless of what we do now, next year, or the next ten years. We’ve passed a point of no return. This is what’s known, at least partially, as climate inertia.

See, the earth doesn’t react immediately to changes. It’s the same reason that we’re seeing more dramatic environmental extremes now, as opposed to twenty years ago, when climate change was really just starting to enter the public mind (though, mind you, scientists have been studying it since the 40’s). The earth is massive, and normally reacts on a scale of thousands or millions of years. Some earth systems, like the oceans, move slower than others, whereas some parts, like humans, are much quicker. The ocean is crucial to understanding this, too, because the ocean, and the fact that water takes longer to heat than air, is partially responsible for this climate delay. The ocean has been a heat sink, trapping and diluting all that extra heat we’ve been building up since we first started emitting greenhouse gases. This is just one example of that, by the way; it’s so much more complicated than just one example. But what this report now says is that we’ve reached a point where the earth is no longer able to mitigate increased temperature as well as it had been, and we’re on track for a sort of runaway warming.

This also ties into the idea of a positive feedback loop. For example, ice is great at reflecting sunshine back out to space. If its gets warmer and melts the ice caps, then there’s less ice to reflect sunshine. Thus, more sunshine is absorbed by the earth. Thus, the earth heats up more. Thus, there’s less ice to reflect sunshine. And on and on. The general idea is that, now, we’re not only several potential tipping points for positive warming feedback loops; we’ve probably passed several tipping points already. Thus, more warming guaranteed for decades to come, and nothing we can do about it. This is the roughest framework of the science that I can muster without reading more into the report, and frankly, it’s too depressing right now for me to do that.

What does this all mean? Well, take a look around. Google “wildfires 2021” for about thirty seconds and you’ll get the idea. How many times this summer have you heard the phrase “record-breaking heat” or “record-breaking fire” or “record-breaking drought” or “record-breaking anything” thrown around? California is on fire. Oregon is on fire. Washington state is on fire. Fucking Greece is on fire. Did you know that? I fucking didn’t. There’s a heat dome, or an atmospheric cell of high temperatures, that boiled sea critters alive. The Midwest is experiencing high heat again after a brutal beginning of the summer. Lake Mead is apparently drying up, and I guess they just announced water limitations for huge swaths of the southwestern US. And that’s just the tip of the melting iceberg. I have felt increasingly like the world is falling apart around me, or sometimes literally going up in smoke, and I don’t know if other people feel that way, too, but they’re gonna notice soon when their house is on fire.

Not that things like drought or wildfire or floods or hurricanes or extreme heat or sea level rise can’t happen on their own. There’s definitely a certain level of natural variability that these things fall within, and it’s irresponsible to look at any given climatic event and attribute it to climate change alone because that’s just not how the systems work. But you can look at a continuing trend and increased intensity and correlate it to other things, like, say, increasing worldwide average temperatures and increasing levels of carbon dioxide and methane. But since we’re on an upward trend, near a relatively early stage, it means that if don’t keep things in check, it’s all going to get worse. Hopefully not much worse, but maybe incredibly worse. Are you willing to take that chance?

So, yeah. It’s gonna get warmer, and it’s not going to stop getting warmer, and there’s nothing we can do about it. That’s why the news is so doom and gloom about it. We have officially reached a point of no return. But there’s a caveat here, something to keep in mind.

We aren’t completely fucked. We just need to work harder.

Here’s the thing about this report; it’s big, and scary, and very likely to be within one standard deviation of being pretty damn accurate. But this is nothing new. This sort of climate science is something that’s been in the books forever. Most models have been saying for about a decade or two now that we’d reach a point where, even if we stopped polluting immediately, things would get worse. This report is just flagging the moment where we’ve reached that point. This is not a breakthrough; this is a baseline. These are the basic facts, supported by reams and reams of data, and here we are. One thing the report repeatedly makes note of is the fact that aren’t locked into the worst-base scenario; we’re only locked into a minimum-case scenario. We can still avoid the worst consequences of climate change, but we have to start now. And we know how to do it, too.

Independent of how old you are, or when you’re reading this, how many times have you heard in your lifetime that we’re approaching a climate disaster? Two? Three? Five? Ten? I’d say no matter what end of the political spectrum you’re on, you’ve heard that phrase thrown around at least a handful of times. How many of them have come true? So far, none. Mostly because we haven’t had enough time yet, and that those predictions still put the worst consequences a few decades down the line. But give it time, and we’ll get there. This is the newest report in a long line of reports warning the world that there’s destruction approaching; this one just happens to have the most recent deadline. My point in bringing this up isn’t to say that you should ignore it, or that the report is wrong; in fact, it’s the opposite. The science has only gotten stronger since all those other reports came out, and we’re more sure than ever that our time is receding before us. And now, I think other people are starting to see it, too. The fires. The droughts. The numbers keep going up. But we can fix it.

I’ll be honest, I haven’t heard a lot on the political right about this in general, though I did read a Fox News article on it, and I was pleasantly surprised by how reasonable it actually was, despite the title being a bit clickbait-y. Sure, they downplay the extremity of it, and that’s fair, to a certain degree; not all models, even within the IPCC report, point to extremes and destruction. And they mentioned climate adaptation, and that people are more likely to find ways to adapt to these extremes than just sit by and let it happen, which is absolutely valid. There’s mention of the prophetic and apocalyptic “catastrophic tipping points” of previous models being now outmoded (which is true, and that’s because models get better over time), and there’s mention of global greening (which actually isn’t as clean-cut a good thing as you’d think), with links to a respectable Nature article and everything. Sure, they throw around the idea that the IPCC is biased towards big government intervention and taking away rights just because it’s run by several governments (and this is a Fox News article, so they’re legally obligated to shit on Big Government), and there’s assertions that there’s some sort of ulterior motive to the UN ringing the “climate bell.” Which, by the way, neither of which is necessarily true. Just because some predictions haven’t come true (or haven’t come true yet) doesn’t mean they aren’t founded. But otherwise, there were some genuine, reasonable points of criticism in the article. Surrounded by political fluff, of course, but everything’s political these days. But, then again, here’s the point that I want to make; if 200 plumbers tell you there’s a 80% chance that your septic tank will blow up in a year, and then a handful of plumbers from a different city tell you there’s an 80% chance it’ll just leak into your basement, you’re still gonna get your pipes checked, right? We need to do something.

And we can. The reason I brought the political right into this is because, while I believe that Capitalism is a stain upon this Earth and we need an complete social, political, and economic shift towards green, sustainable energy and a non-exploitive, socialist, human-centered economy NOW, it doesn’t matter what side of the aisle you’re on. There are things that need to be done, and various ways to do it. For example, and this is something that I have to bring every once in a while because it makes me rather unpopular with certain groups, nuclear energy is good. We need nuclear energy as a stepping stone to true sustainability. The political right likes to make fun of electric cars because they’re made with coal-burning power plants. And you know what? They’re right. The carbon emissions that go into making an electric vehicle are still as high as a regular car, if not higher, thanks to the special chemicals necessary for all those batteries. Along their lifetime, electric vehicles still have a lower carbon footprint, but that initial investment is so destructive. So, how are we supposed to make electric cars without fossil fuel-powered power plants? Or how are we supposed to construct all the solar panels and wind turbines we’ll need in order to make more solar panels and wind turbines? Well, in my opinion, and apparently the opinion of the IPCC, it’s nuclear energy. That’s just one part of the many, many solutions that we need if we’re going to avoid the worst case scenario.

I feel a bit like a broken record, saying this over and over again. This is like the second or third time I’ve written this same kind of article, I think. But I guess I’ll keep writing it until something gets done. Because the science says that we’re through the gate and locked the door behind us. Things aren’t going to get better on their own. Unless someone like us cares a whole awful lot, nothing’s going to get better. It’s not. And while it’s entirely coincidence, it’s almost too good to be true that The Lorax turns 50 this week, the same week it feels like we’re striding into the end days. But we aren’t. It’s not the end days. This is not the end of the world, although it very often feels like it, for me. This is not an excuse to give up, or stop trying. This is another reason, in a long list of many, to keep trying. I believe we need radical change if we want to avoid environmental collapse, but even if you don’t agree with me, surely you see that something has got to give. But I also think it has to give at a bigger level than just individual action. Going vegetarian is great and all, and buying less meat is the best single thing you as an individual can do to help stop climate change, but we need real change. We need more. And next week, I’ll talk about just one example of how it can be done.

Things look grim. The IPCC isn’t happy, and none of us should be. But we can’t quit now. Now is the time to really get started. It’s not just our children’s futures on the lines, anymore; if anything, this new report should hit home that it’s everyone’s futures now. Climate change is here, and we have to fight it, somehow. It might not be so bad, in the end. Or it could end up being much, much worse. We just don’t know. But we need to try. If you’re reading this, promise me you’ll try. Things are heating up everywhere, forever. But it’s not the end. I promise you that.