The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will shortly publish part one of its Sixth Assessment Report on Climate Change.
A scientific spectacle.
One of the polite rituals of this presentation is to document the climate policies of the almost two hundred UN states, which have so far been found to be inadequate, with a lot of figures, while still allowing a mild breeze of fundamental criticism of climate policy.
The storm is coming anyway.
For the climate specialists, it is imperative to prevent one of the most likely impressions conveyed by Fridays for Future: that of hopelessness.
Which is why the Climate Council is doing everything to indicate that the glass of global climate management is not half empty, but still half full - insight and reversal are still possible.
Joachim Müller-Jung
Editor in the features section, responsible for the “Nature and Science” section.
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A dangerous distortion? From a geoscientific perspective, the shop window optimism of the experts is reflected in the balance sheet of the 33 years of the IPCC: the interpretations of climate change tended to be too optimistic. The warming curve is in fact at the upper end of the previous projections. At the same time, the experts try everything to better represent the scenarios of possible climate futures in their models from time to time. For the 1.5-degree special report by the IPCC alone, which dealt with the fulfillment of the Paris targets, 414 different emission scenarios were modeled. In other words: A huge amount of computing time was invested in the search for ways to prevent global warming above 1.5 degrees above the pre-industrial level. Of these many possible emission scenarios, fifty were with the 1,The 5-degree target is compatible insofar as one actually stays below or only briefly above the ecologically and climatically critical threshold value in the coming decades. So the answer from the IPCC was: It can be done.
But how realistic and credible is this announced feasibility in a social context? And at what price? In the run-up to the Sixth Assessment Report, many climate research teams are apparently dealing with the question - quite self-critically, because among the authors involved there are almost inevitably some who were more or less prominent in the IPCC process. Johan Rockström, for example, who worked with the British Tim Lenton and emissions specialist Nebojsa Nakicenovic from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) on a paper by the Potsdam climate researcher Lila Warszawski in the Environmental Research Letters. The group checked the IPCC scenarios according to the extent to which they can be realized technically, politically and industrially in the coming decades. Conclusion:The time window for feasible climate protection options is closing at breakneck speed. In the meantime there are apparently only twenty scenarios, but all of them contain at least one “challenging lever”. In other words: the risk of exceeding 1.5 degrees is now very high. Afforestation, land use changes, the reduction of energy demand, the switch to fossil-free energy sources, targeted measures to remove carbon dioxide from the air - all of these are individual "levers" for climate protection that are more or less useful in different scenarios.Exceeding 5 degrees is now very high. Afforestation, land use changes, the reduction of energy demand, the switch to fossil-free energy sources, targeted measures to remove carbon dioxide from the air - all of these are individual "levers" for climate protection that are more or less useful in different scenarios.Exceeding 5 degrees is now very high. Afforestation, land use changes, the reduction of energy demand, the switch to fossil-free energy sources, targeted measures to remove carbon dioxide from the air - all of these are individual "levers" for climate protection that are more or less useful in different scenarios.