IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, Working Group 3

When I wrote yesterday's post about the IPCC AR6 Working Group 2 report, I had a thought.  I almost included it in the post, but for some reason left it out.  It was basically this: the report discussed adaptations to risks, that is, actions to minimize the damage from expected risks or after-the-fact actions to cope with damage from risks that had actually happened.  But the report did not mention the partner word to adaptation, mitigation.  Mitigation is the climate change buzzword for prevention, i.e., what can and should and might be done to keep the greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere in the first place.  It seemed a huge and obvious omission to me, given the subjects covered by this report.

This just goes to show how much I am learning by doing this blog.  After I put up yesterday's post, I asked myself, "Hmmm, I wonder what Working Group 3 is about?" [Tremolo violins indicating foreshadowing of major plot twist]

The title of the report from Working Group 3 is Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change.  You can go to its page here.  This major, focused discussion of mitigation is the climax of the whole two year, 3 report process of the IPCC Assessment Reports. If you go to the page, you can learn all about the timeline for the WG3 process that kicked off in May of 2017 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to draft the outline of the report.  The process was to have concluded in July of 2021, but was delayed due to the pandemic.  You can dig down into the WG3 Timeline to find that the virtual session for consideration and approval of the Report is scheduled from March 21 to 25, 2022.  You can go to the calendar for the entire IPCC to find that the approval meeting has been lengthened from March 21 to April 1, 2022. Also that the last remaining work of the AR6 cycle is then to produce the Synthesis Report, due to be approved in a couple of back-to-back in-person sessions in Geneva, Switzerland in September and October of 2022.

So, fine, the usual IPCC bureaucracy whose wheels grind slowly but grind exceeding fine.

But wait, there's more!

A faint memory came to the fore of seeing something some months ago on the internet of an IPCC report having been leaked.  What was that about?  And, it turns out, that may be the big news of IPCC AR6. Which I had forgotten about and only remembered because I have been digging into this.

Some significant number of scientists who worked on the WG3 report, and probably earlier reports under the IPCC, have apparently gotten sick of working their hearts out to warn humanity of the dire, impending doom we all face, only to have their language - already pretty steady technical prose - further softened by the politicians who get the final say on each report before it is released to the public.  It would only have taken one scientist to leak the earlier draft to the public.  But it took many more scientists and supporters to produce the Scientist Rebellion website, loudly proclaiming "We have leaked the upcoming IPCC WGIII Report!"  There is a Demands Letter with 155 signatories at present.  The Scientist Rebellion group, no surprise, works within the wider framework of the Extinction Rebellion movement, as explained here.

Scientist Rebellion actually leaked just the Summary for Policymakers (37 pages) and Chapter 1 (98 pages, including executive summary) of the full Report; they placed them in a publicly accessible Google Drive folder here.  

The key, stark message of the report: the history of international greenhouse gas mitigation has been delay; there is NO time for further delay; because of delay up to now, what must be done to keep the world inhabitable is unbelievably, unprecedentedly difficult.  The report displays scenarios where what must be done is in fact too difficult.  The "business as usual" scenario is the worst, and by 2100 it does render the world uninhabitable (they don't say that directly, but everyone knows what a world 5 degrees Celsius warmer means).

But what exactly is that which must be done?  And can it be done?  Those are the unresolved questions in my mind that will be explored in further posts.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

 Paul Kingsnorth Paul Kingsnorth, author of Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist  was well profiled in the New York Times magazine of Sunday, April 17, 2014, in an article entitled It's the End of the World As We Know It, and He Feels Fine  ( link , behind a paywall). At that time I had a good understanding of climate change but not a lot of active participation in anti-climate-change activism.  Here was a guy who had been very active for decades, and seemed intelligent, and was saying there was essentially no hope.  All the work, all the effort, and no progress, just falling behind farther and farther.  According to the article he came under a fair amount of fire from the remaining legions of activists. My daughter read the same article and said it was "just too sad" to accept what Kingsnorth said.  She has become active in Extinction Rebellion and The Climate Mobilization. I followed up by reading Kingsnorth's article The Witness  in Tri...
Read more
The Sunrise Movement If you want to understand the red-hot cutting edge of the state of climate change activism, you can do no better than to read the article Not Dark Yet from the New Yorker magazine. I got the March 7, 2022 issue in the mail today. I just read the entire 8 page article by Andrew Marantz.  The subtitle is The Sunrise Movement wants to revolutionize climate politics . Oddly, the online version accessible from the link in the paragraph above has a completely different title and subtitle.  Bleeding edge! The New Yorker magazine often carries articles from the best climate journalists, like Elizabeth Kolbert and Bill McKibben.  I've been a subscriber for years.  My mother told me that I learned to read from looking with her at her albums of New Yorker cartoons.  You can get various introductory subscriptions here . I don't know Andrew Marantz yet, but he may be the next generation.  In fact, the article conveys the idea that the generations o...
Read more