The Climate Emergency

Apparently, the situation is bad but not as dire as is sometimes claimed:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25734211-000-the-worst-case-climate-scenarios-are-no-longer-plausible-today/

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).

When XR was set up on 2018 they claimed that the world was on course for average global temperature to go up to 5 degrees centigrade beyond pre-industrial levels by the end of the century. This was the worst case scenario the IPCC envisaged and was based on the assumption that no action at all would be taken to try to reduce CO2 emissions.

In this article it is claimed that we are now on course for an increase to 3.6 degrees. Which I think was more or less the second worst case scenario in 2018. Which is an implicit admission that something has been done so as to at least prevent the worst case scenario. The 3.6 degrees scenario is again based on nothing (more) being done in the course of the next few decades to reduce emissions. Which is unlikely.

At the moment the likely scenario is that we are on course for an increase of somewhere to between 2 and 3 degrees by the end of the century. Not good but not as bad as 3.6 or 5 degrees.

And what about this:

“Some prominent climate scientists predict that at 7.2°F (4°C) of warming, the planet will be able to support less than 1 billion people. Our human population is expected to reach 10 billion by 2050 at the same time that our food production is decreasing.”

That sounds alarmist to me as, if it happened, that would mean that some 9 million people would perish.

There are different questions here:

1. If there were to be an increase to 4 degrees, would it be the case that only 1 billion out of 10 billion humans would be able to survive?

2. How likely is an increase to 4 degrees?

The first could be true and the second not likely.

Incidentally, presumably, with an increase to 3.6 degrees, billions would still have to perish, even if not the full 9 billion.

If XR Japan are saying that the most likely scenario will involve, say, 5 billion perishing by 2100 due to climate change then, yes, I would say they were being alarmist.

Nobody is objecting to saying that a further rise to between 2 and 3 degrees above pre-industrial levels (we are already a little abo e 1 degree more) won’t cause serious problems in sone parts of the world which capitalism won’t be able to cope with properly.

What is “alarmist” (which dictionaries defined as “someone who exaggerates a danger and so causes needless worry or panic”) is the claim that the most likely future scenario is somewhere between 3.5 and 4 degrees and that this will reduce the carrying capacity of Earth to only 1 billion humans, ie that up to 9 billion will die of starvation. I don’t think even Malthus would envisage that.

You yourself, Alan, have been — rightly — insistent on debunking “overpopulation chatter”. There is an article in the February Socialist Standard recalling that in the 1960s the likes of Paul Ehrlich were predicting mass starvation before the end of the last century. They were wrong.

Let that be a lesson to us about being alarmist about population.

Also, the effects of a rise to between 2 and 3 degrees will be worse if it happens under capitalism. If it happened on a world socialist society then the problem could be dealt with in a planned and rational way. So capitalism is as much to blame here as climate change.

The real emergency is to get rid of capitalism.