The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a useful scientific body as a starting point for the interpretation of climate-related data. Their best-case target of a 1.5C limit to warming ‘above pre-industrial levels’ (levels in the revised baseline year of 1850) is acceptable, and their raw data and climate modelling is taken as a good, although conservative starting point for the lay activist.
However, note this excerpt from the Australian May 2019 report Existential climate-related security risk (listed on the hottest links page here):
‘[IPCC] Assessment Reports exhibit a one-sided reliance on general climate models, which incorporate important climate processes, but do not include all of the processes that can contribute to system feedbacks, compound extreme events, and abrupt and/or irreversible changes. Other forms of knowledge are downplayed, including paleoclimatology, expert advice, and semi-empirical models. IPCC reports present detailed, quantified, complex modelling results, but then briefly note more severe, non- linear, system-change possibilities in a descriptive, non-quantified form.’
Additionally, IPCC scenarios and literature downplay the fact that 3 degrees of warming (Anthropogenic Global Warming or AGW) above pre-industrial levels, by the year 2100 is already locked in to the Earth’s climate, barring a presupposed industrial miracle (see below), although it hasn’t fully unfolded yet. This is largely due to ‘climate lag’.
All IPCC 1.5-2C global scenarios and recommended pathways for governments rely on global-scale, unproven carbon reduction technologies -mainly ‘BECCS’ technologies that take CO2 out of the atmosphere (see diagram above). ‘BECCS’ stands for Bio-energy with Carbon Capture and Storage. This unprecedented technological revolution, requiring unprecedented global co-operation, would need to launch within the next ten years, and there are no signs whatsoever of it happening. In fact, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions were at their highest ever in 2018 and showed no signs of slowing.
It is this fairy-tale narrative of ‘mass carbon reduction’ that defined the non-binding inter-governmental Paris Agreement of 2015. According to the ‘Paris Narrative’, all carbon dioxide emissions reductions pathways towards 1.5-2C rely on the science fiction of the massive, expensive and as yet non-existent industrial revolution of BECCS and other CCS methods. This is why 2025-2030 is the appropriate target for reducing global carbon emissions to zero, not 2050 as put forward by the BECCS-dependent Paris Narrative. A 2025-2030 global target requires nothing less than a movement of global mass civil disobedience to challenge and revolutionise our political and economic systems and our energy infrastructures. Belief in the Paris Narrative will have us sleep-walking into a 3+ degree warmer world, which some experts say is incompatible with organised human life. Beware the Paris Narrative! Paris Narrative warnings, where institutions / websites are obviously reliant on the Paris Narrative, are marked in the Well Hunted, Well Gathered directory thus: !Paris!
!The Epic Tomorrows of Earth 