Reply To: The Climate Emergency
Apparently, the situation is bad but not as dire as is sometimes claimed:
Here’s is an extract from the article:
“Ten years ago there was a genuine fear that we were heading forcatastrophic warming of between 4°C and 5°C by 2100. Today, those worst-case scenarios are no longer plausible.
The story goes back to 2014, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published future greenhouse gas emissions scenarios. To make this baggy monster tractable, the scientists boiled themdown to four: one very high scenario, one very low and two in between. The very high one assumed that there would be no climate action whatsoever and that use of fossil fuels would continue on an upward trajectory until 2100. It became known as the business as usual scenario, or BAU.
BAU quickly garnered more scientific and media attention than the other scenarios, in part because it extrapolated the situation at the time, but also because it made for sensational scientific papers and apocalyptic newspaper headlines. A BAU world would have been a “truly catastrophic hellscape of a planet”, says climate scientist Zeke Hausfather of NGO Berkeley Earth in California.
In the years since, however, the world has changed dramatically. Progress on renewable energy technology and implementation of climate policies have bent the emissions curve downwards towards warming of around 3°C by the end of the century. Still dangerous, but not hellish. And further progress isn’t just possible, but promised. Recent analyses show that, if countries achieve the net-zero pledges that they have already put on the table, warming will stay under 2°C.
As a result, the BAU scenario is no longer even remotely plausible, says Roger Pielke, an environmental scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Nor is the next-worse of the four. “It looks like the apocalyptic scenarios, as of today, are off the table,” he says.
If anything, says Hausfather, BAU was implausible in the first place. It wasn’t just a conservative extrapolation of current trends, but a turbocharged one that assumed, for example, that the use of coal would increase fivefold by 2100, with no climate mitigation action whatsoever.
And yet, the now-obsolete BAU scenario continues to dominate scientific discussions of our climate future. According to a recent analysis by Pielke, the two most recent reports by the IPCC actually increased their emphasis on that worst-case scenario.
This bias is also reflected in scientific journals. An analysis by Pielke’s colleague Matthew Burgess found that in the aquatic conservation literature, over 90 per cent of papers published between 2015 and 2022 use the BAU scenario – and about a third use it exclusively. It leaks out into the news media too. “The picture that we paint in terms of science, assessment, journalism and policy is dominated by the most extreme scenario,” says Pielke.
This puts climate scientists on the horns of a dilemma. Do they admit BAU was never really that plausible and risk deniers saying “we told you so” and spreading further muck about climate modelling? Or do they keep pushing BAU and risk it becoming obvious they are hawking a straw man, opening the door to… deniers saying “we told you so”? ”
We face the same dilemma — of seeming to argue that capitalism (responsible for climate change) is not as bad as some people claim (because it can and is doing — in fact has to do — something about it).