This story was originally published on Yale E360. It is reproduced as part of Climate Desk’s collaboration. Climate negotiators met in Dubai last month and pledged to chart the course for stabilizing climate system by using good science. Many scientists, however, say that these promises are at worst vague and at best ill defined.
As part of the Climate Desk collaboration, Yale E360 previously published this story, which is reproduced here.
Next month’s meeting of climate negotiators in Dubai promised to develop a strategy for scientifically stabilizing the climate system. However, some scientists contend that these promises are at best vague and full of flaws, and at worst a travesty of fine science.
The UN climate conference in Dubai decided on a strategy for achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 in order to maintain the world’s goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius ( 2. 7 degrees Fahrenheit ). Both goals would be pursued “in keeping with the science,” the negotiators promised.
However, neither of the goals has a defined definition that would allow one to assess their success. Two studies released during the Dubai event revealed the issue and showed significant gaps opening over both the 1.5-degree and net-zero targets, highlighting the conflicts between political expediency and academic objectivity.
American meteorologists stated in the journal Nature that a disagreement over how to measure global average temperatures is possible to delay proper recognition that the threshold has been exceeded by up to ten years when it comes to the 1.5-degree target. The outcome will be “distraction and delay just at the point when climate action is most urgent,” leading to temperature “overshoot” and the need for extremely expensive—and unproven—actions afterward to reverse warming, according to lead author Richard Betts of the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre.
The 1.5-degree threshold, which is “uncharted territory,” was exceeded by about a fourth of days in 2023.
The rules governing how nations can declare they have reached net-zero emissions are fixed, according to a study led by climate modeler Matthew Gidden at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis ( IIASA ) in Austria, allowing governments to do so years before scientific reality.
Concerned researchers claim that up until this point, these crucial technical issues had mostly gone unnoticed. This is partly because, in an effort to increase public support for climate action, scientists did not want to mislead or naysay policymakers. However, the differences cast major doubt on whether governments are genuinely dedicated to upholding the science. According to IIASA forest ecologist Dmitry Shchepashchenko, “politicians are trying to find an easy way to meet their pledges.”
However, there is a growing need to resolve the uncertainties. The climate system has entered what researchers are referring to as “uncharted territory” over the previous year. In 2023, about one-third of the days fell below the 1.5-degree mark, and September was 1.8 degrees warmer than average. The unprocessed data led to record wildfires in Canada, sea ice loss around Antarctica, unheard-of summer heatwaves from Arizona to southeastern China, and severe flooding in North Africa’s typically dry regions.
Through the historic 2015 Paris Agreement, the goal of halting international warming at 1.5 degrees C above preindustrial levels first entered global climate policymaking. Governments pledged to maintain warming” properly below 2 degrees” while “pursuaging efforts” to keep it below 1.5 degrees as part of the agreement.
Since then, scientists have issued a warning that any prolonged warming above 1.5 degrees carries the risk of intensifying hazardous weather and resulting in important and irreversible changes to the climate system. As a result, it had become the clear objective by the Dubai conference.
But how can we tell if we’ve stayed within or gone above it?
According to the UN World Meteorological Organization, there is a two-thirds chance that one year will surpass the threshold by 2027. For a one-off would not, on its own, exceed the agreed-upon goal, which is based on long-term common temperatures. However, neither the Paris Agreement nor its successors specified how to determine that long-term average.
The average temperature trends over the past three decades have typically been evaluated by climate scientists. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ( IPCC ) of the UN, which evaluates climate science for the global community, has favored 20 years. Calculations based on current past temperatures, however, indicate that the average will usually fall short of reality due to the period’s cooler earlier years. According to Betts in the Nature article that was released during the Dubai conference, the results wo n’t take into account the current situation.
” Governments are playing a social game to make 1.5 seem more possible,” they claim.
According to Betts, a 20-year average will actually reflect temperatures in the middle of that time. ” A decade after crossing the 1.5- degree C level, 1.5 warming would be confirmed.”
Therefore, if average warming reaches 1.5 degrees in 2030, the records wo n’t catch up until 2040, or the end of the 20-year period in which 2030 was the midpoint. According to Betts, there would be” a decade or more” of claims and counterclaims in the years that followed, with politicians ready to refute climate scientists ‘ assertions that the world had almost undoubtedly crossed the threshold and assert that they still had time to reduce emissions.
Piers Forster, a lead author of various IPCC reports from the University of Leeds, claims that this denial ritual was now on display in Dubai. He draws attention to the fact that, despite the latest real average being around 1.3 degrees, the conference’s global stocktake agreement, which summarized action plans to meet the Paris pledges, stated that warming had already occurred at a rate of 1.1 degrees. According to Forster, governments are “playing a social game to make 1.5 seem more feasible.”
Betts wants a “more automatic indicator” to be adopted by the IPCC to put an end to the ruse. According to his paper, the average temperature can be determined by fusing 10 years ‘ worth of historical temperature data with the predictions made by models of future temperatures over a 10-year period. That would be contentious. But for the time being, he asserts,” there cannot be agreement on when the 1.5oC level has been reached without an agreed parameter.”
How to evaluate progress on government commitments to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 presents a minute challenge to the scientific integrity of the UN climate negotiations. According to the commitments, any ongoing greenhouse gas emissions must be offset by human efforts to capture comparable amounts, whether they occur in forests or abroad, by that time. However, there is widespread worry among scientists that the system used by negotiators to calculate these “offsets” is incompatible and vulnerable to abuse.
The IPCC second put forth the online- zero target. It was enshrined in the Dubai agreement as a top priority of climate policy and widely adopted two years back at the Glasgow climate conference, when 74 nations pledged to achieve it. However, there are two quite different approaches to calculating net zero: a clinical approach used by IPCC scientists to measure carbon in the real world, and slacker approach taken by negotiators and then incorporated into UN climate agreements.
Gidden and other climate scientists issue a warning that the UN’s flimsy offsets formula wo n’t stop rising greenhouse gas concentrations, which will cause temperatures to keep rising.
The majority of offsets that governments are thinking about involve forest management, also known as “nature-based solutions to climate change.” However, because carbon is continually being captured and released obviously by forests, it can be challenging to determine which carbon uptake in forests is anthropogenic and thus probably qualifying as an offset against emissions.
Just forests that are instantly managed, according to scientists and UN negotiators, should be considered potential offsets. Beyond that, however, there is conflict.
Simply carbon obtained through direct human activity in managed forests, such as tree planting or decreased logging, should be eligible under the IPCC approach. Since carbon is merely a component of the normal cycling of carbon between ecosystems and the atmosphere, it should not be counted as carbon that is captured inside managed forests due to natural processes.
However, the climate negotiators have adopted a unique strategy. They claim that it can be nearly impossible to tell the difference between human and healthy behavior at the local level. By allowing all carbon captured inside managed forests to qualify for offsetting against emissions, they have thus found a solution to the issue.
According to Gidden’s study, the results from the two approaches can be quite dissimilar. Due to increased growth brought on by warmer and drier weather as well as the nourishing effects of excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, some of the world’s excellent forests are now capturing carbon on a big scale. According to UN regulations, this normal uptake increases the amount of carbon that nations can offset from their emissions, speeding up their transition to net zero.
According to Gidden’s study, governments can collectively offset between 4 and 7 billion tons of CO2 every from biological processes that do not meet the IPCC criteria. This represents between 10 and 18 percent of the total fossil fuel emissions currently in existence, and he anticipates that this percentage will increase even more between now and 2050.
Fair enough, some might argue. It makes no difference whether the processes involved in the capture are healthy or human if the carbon capture is true. Giacomo Grassi, a researcher at the Joint Research Center of the German Commission and coworker on the Gidden paper, concurs that the atmosphere is unconcerned with the source of carbon dioxide. However, he continues,” to assess]policy ] progress, the way the land sink is counted as human or natural still matters.”
The UN’s strategy is to “write a blank check for woodland nations intent on continuing to burn geological fuels.”
Additionally, it matters because reducing emissions should be done very rather than giving some heavily forested nations a free ride. Additionally, Grassi contends that normal carbon-capture processes are frequently transient and susceptible to reversal, particularly as climate change quickens.
Some areas may now benefit from capture as a result of climate change, but droughts, higher temperatures, and fires may soon transform these carbon sinks again into carbon sources. In fact, according to scientists, that is very good. According to Gidden, forests that are already capturing carbon will start releasing it again in large quantities after the middle of the century, drastically reducing net-zero compliance.
According to Chris Jones, a carbon-cycle analyst at the UK Met Office who has reviewed the Gidden paper, the UN will be able to “declare world net-zero emissions to have been achieved some years earlier than would be the case according to the IPCC definition” as the result of the free UN rules. Even worse, they might declare success but not actually reach net zero.
The UN methodology, according to various experts on the carbon cycle, is a disaster that will dash any chance of achieving true net zero. According to Wolfgang Knorr, an ecologist at Lund University in Sweden, it is “essentially writing a blank check for woodland countries intent on continuing to burn fossil fuels.” He refers to it as an “accounting trick” that will eventually manifest as increased warming and atmospheric carbon dioxide. However, none of those in charge will be in office by the time everyone understands this.
In some nations, there is a significant difference between the two carbon-accounting techniques. Cooler temperatures are now causing rapid forest growth in Russia, which is home to more than a fifth of the world’s trees. The huge forests that cover Siberia, according to the majority of conservationists, are very close to their natural state. They contend that “natural processes cannot be counted as being a result of forest management” in like locations, according to Shchepashchenko.
Moscow, however, has a different perspective. Since the majority of these remote forests have been deemed “managed,” their carbon accumulation can be offset against the nation’s carbon emissions. Russia’s declared “net” emissions are cut by a quarter in its most recent UN emission declaration, which subtracts 540 million tons of forest carbon from its entire emissions of 2.12 billion tons. Ministers have expressed a desire to “maximize” their contribution to reducing emissions by expanding the definition of managed forests even further.
The United States is not all that unique. Through a combination of biological regeneration following historical deforestation and the fertilization effect of increased CO2 in the atmosphere, some Eastern forests, particularly those of the Appalachians, are rapidly absorbing carbon. In order to take advantage of this, the Environmental Protection Agency submitted submissions to the UN that balanced carbon uptake in forests and another managed lands with 11.9 percent of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions. However, a study conducted by William Anderegg and colleagues at the University of Utah last year found” substantial risks of carbon losses …in regions where forest carbon offset projects are currently located” that” striking uncertainty” about how this number might change in the future due to climate change.
Climate negotiators and carbon modelers appear to be at odds. Gidden claims that” the impact of this discrepancy on national and international mitigation benchmarks is also not well understood” despite its obvious importance. But if net zero is certainly to be attained “in keeping with the science,” he claims, it must be resolved. And immediately.
According to Grassi, the gap must be filled in the future reviews of regional contributions to addressing climate change. Delegates will meet in Belem, the largest rainforest in the world, on the edge of the Brazilian Amazon, in 2025 to complete the reassessments, which started in Dubai.
According to Grassi, nations” should start the reassessments from corrected values.” Then, the carbon sinks that support the claim will vanish sometime in the middle of the century, right when the world celebrates achieving net zero. The “accounting trick” of today will be revealed. But it’s to late. As part of the Climate Desk collaboration, Yale E360 previously published this story, which is reproduced around. Next month’s meeting of climate negotiators in Dubai promised to develop a strategy for scientifically stabilizing the climate system. However, some scientists claim that these promises are vague and whole, at best poorly defined, and at worst a travesty of good science.
This story was originally published on Yale E360. It is reproduced as part of Climate Desk’s collaboration. Climate negotiators met in Dubai last month and pledged to chart the course for stabilizing climate system by using good science. Many scientists, however, say that these promises are at worst vague and at best ill defined.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/01/cop28-un-climate-pact-problems-bad-science/
