The ‘Pakistan one third underwater’ lie gets yet another airing here, while Arctic summer sea ice keeps confounding the doomsters. Pretending to know the future of global climate via modelling has only led to the failure of numerous over-the-top predictions so far.
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Diplomats from nearly 200 nations and top climate scientists begin a week-long huddle in Switzerland Monday to distill nearly a decade of published science into a 20-odd-page warning about the existential danger of global warming, and what to do about it, says Phys.org.
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s synthesis report—to be released on March 20—will detail observed and projected changes in Earth’s climate system; past and future impacts such as devastating heatwaves, flooding and rising seas; and ways to halt the carbon pollution [sic] pushing Earth toward an unlivable state. [Talkshop comment – unverified claim].
“It’s a massive moment, seven years since the Paris Agreement and nine years since the last IPCC assessment report,” Greenpeace Nordic senior policy advisor Kaisa Kosonen, an official observer at IPCC meetings, told AFP.
Since its creation in 1988, the IPCC—an intergovernmental body staffed by hundreds of volunteer scientists—has released six, three-part assessments, the most recent in 2021-2022.
“It is scientists telling governments how they are doing during these crucial defining years,” Kosonen said.
The report card is not good: global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to grow, even as science has cautioned that deadly consequences are coming sooner and at lower levels of warming than previously thought.
Since the late 19th century, Earth’s average surface temperature has risen more than 1.1 degrees Celsius, enough to amplify a crescendo of weather catastrophes on every continent. [Talkshop comment – mere psychobabble].
Carbon budgets
Under the 2015 Paris treaty, nations promised to collectively cap the rise at “well below” 2C, and at 1.5C if possible.
An IPCC special report in 2018 made it alarmingly clear that the more ambitious aspirational goal—since adopted by governments and business as a hard target—was a better bet for a climate-safe world.
But an already narrow pathway has become a tightrope: humanity’s “carbon budget” for staying under the 1.5C barrier is less than 300 billion metric tons of CO2, barely seven times current yearly emissions, according to the IPCC.
Two other special reports—one on oceans and Earth’s frozen zones, the other on forests and land use—will also be covered in the summary for policymakers under review in Interlaken.
Full article here.
via Tallbloke’s Talkshop
March 13, 2023 at 06:46AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 