Science news: Climate change cheating at Paris, atmospheric red flags — important as COP29 approaches

Not that this will actually affect anything undertaken at COP29, starting with the hypocrisy of it once again being held in a petrostate, this time, Baku Azerbaijan. (Yale Climate Connections notes that countries of the world need a "quantum leap" just on meeting current, and currently unfulfilled, commitments from past climate "accords.")

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The cheating at Paris? I'm talking about the Paris round of climate change "accord" talks, which I have long ago called "Jell-O" that was made such by two people: Dear Leader Obama and Xi Jinping.

Now, more evidence in that general direction? Two Swedish academics talk about what was essentially game-rigging on trying to stay below 1.5°C, which we of course have broken already.

(S)oon, the ambitious Paris agreement limit turned out to be not much of a limit at all. When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (or IPCC, the world’s foremost body of climate experts) lent its authority to the 1.5°C temperature target with its 2018 special report, something odd transpired.

Nearly all modelled pathways for limiting global heating to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels involved temporarily transgressing this target. Each still arrived back at 1.5°C eventually (the deadline being the random end point of 2100), but not before first shooting past it.

OK ....

They then spell this out:

De facto, what they said was this: staying below a temperature limit is the same as first crossing it and then, a few decades hence, using methods of removing carbon from the atmosphere to dial temperatures back down again.

From some corners of the scientific literature came the assertion that this was nothing more than fantasy. A new study published in Nature has now confirmed this critique. It found that humanity’s ability to restore Earth’s temperature below 1.5°C of warming, after overshooting it, cannot be guaranteed

Fantasy! Many of us have already faulted the IPCC for being overly conservative. Now, per further items in the piece, it appears that this overt conservativism (contra climate change Obamiacs like Michael Mann and Katharine Hayhoe, with Mann even attacking James Hansen) was deliberate for political reasons.

Read on, MacDuff: 

If reversal cannot be guaranteed, then clearly it is irresponsible to sanction a supposedly temporary overshoot of the Paris targets. And yet this is exactly what scientists have done. What compelled them to go down this dangerous route?

Our own book on this topic (Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown, published last week by Verso) offers a history and critique of the idea.

When overshoot scenarios were summoned into being in the early 2000s, the single most important reason was economics. Rapid, near-term emissions cuts were deemed prohibitively costly and so unpalatable. Cost optimisation mandated that they be pushed into the future to the extent possible.

Politics! Also note the phrase "Climate Breakdown," in the book.

Politics!

(B)ecause modellers could not imagine transgressing the deeply conservative constraints that they worked within, something else had to be transgressed.

One team stumbled upon the idea that large-scale removal of carbon might be possible in the future, and so help reverse climate change. The EU and then the IPCC picked up on it, and before long, overshoot scenarios had colonised the expert literature. Deference to mainstream economics yielded a defence of the political status quo. This in turn translated into reckless experimentation with the climate system. Conservatism or fatalism about society’s capacity for change flipped into extreme adventurism about nature.

There we are.

And read that Nature study. (I'll be trying to find that book!) It notes the real cost is that of carbon removal. IF possible. It also goes into more detail about how climate change feedbacks that are likely already being cooked into the system can't necessarily be undone by negative human GHG emissions.

Update, Nov. 25: Grist takes a further look at "Overshoot," the book by the academics, Andreas Malm and Wim Carton.

“Overshoot is here not a fate passively acquiesced to,” Carton and Malm, both professors at Lund University in Sweden, write in the book’s introduction. “It is an actively championed programme for how to deal with the rush into catastrophe: let it continue for the time being, and then we shall sort things out towards the end of this century.”

And, this is part one of a two-part book set, reportedly.

AND? They're reportedly Marxists. If that's behind callouts like this of Nordhaus:

One of the first examples of overshoot thinking in the mainstream was an influential 1991 paper by the economist William Nordhaus, referred to by Carton and Malm as “the Genghis Khan of bourgeois climate economics.” The article, titled “To Slow or Not to Slow: The Economics of the Greenhouse Effect,” asked what an optimal economic policy would be for dealing with climate change. Nordhaus concluded that a rapid transition away from fossil fuels would carry a steep cost for the economy and that the task should be put off for future generations. Fossil fuels will help the world develop faster, he reasoned, making societies richer and better equipped to deal with climate fallout. (Despite experts flagging a number of errors with this logic, Nordhaus won a Nobel Prize for his life’s work in 2018.)

All the better.

And, per that Jell-O I mentioned up top?

This:

“If there was equality in Paris, it came in the form of a shared unaccountability: the agreement required that no one was required to act at any certain level,” Carton and Malm wrote. “Now what do you get when a seemingly strict target is combined with such lax rules? You get overshoot.”

Is so true. 

Finally, the authors tackle the issue of stranded assets, and note how much of an obstacle they will continue to be.

Sadly, nobody will be listening.

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The atmospheric red flags connect. A new study shows that global methane emissions continue to rise. And, guess who's one of the worst offenders of a 2021 global methane emissions agreement? China is also in the top five, as are the rest of the BRICS countries not named South Africa.

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And, a friendly reminder — it's not fundagelicals vs the liberally religious that's the big divide on taking climate change seriously, as a climate crisis. It's secularists/non-metaphysicians/atheists vs everybody else AND that "everybody else" includes the so-called Nones or religiously unaffiliated.