A Conversation About the Climate with the IPCC
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has a history of burying the lede.
Yes, it’s ‘lede’. Strange but true. Anyway, back to the IPCC. They use very scientific, cautious language. They seem to go out of their way to avoid causing alarm.
For example, buried somewhere on the 8 millionth page* of one of their many reports, you’ll find something pretty damned terrifying, which I’ll explain below. This is what it looks like (I don’t suggest trying to read it):
What this means
Here I offer you a simulated conversation between you or I (an ‘Interested Citizen’) and the IPCC - if they were to use plain English.
Interested Citizen: “Ok, so I hear there’s this idea to keep the global temperature increase from climate change below 2C, or preferably below 1.5C. Right?”
IPCC: “Right. The international community has mostly agreed on that. If we allow the planet to warm more than that, it’s very likely things are going to get pretty nasty.”
Interested Citizen: “What does that mean? And can you be sure?”
IPCC: “There’s always uncertainty when it comes to the climate. But to the best of our understanding, warming above 2C will cause widespread droughts and other extreme weather events, displacing hundreds of millions or perhaps billions of people. Sea levels will rise tens of feet, flooding hundreds of coastal cities and other low-lying areas. We don’t know exactly how bad it will be, but humans need nature to be healthy to get water and food. There is a real risk of dramatic resource shortages, widespread suffering, severe geopolitical disruption, and the collapse of ecosystems.”
Interested Citizen: “That sounds terrible. Where are we now? Are we approaching 1.5C or 2C?”
IPCC: “The planet has already warmed 1C. Since there’s a lag from emissions to warming, a 1.5C increase is probably already impossible to avoid. To avoid disaster scenarios, we need to cut emissions by 25-50% over the next decade.”
Interested Citizen: “Ok...are we on track to do that?”
IPCC: “No way. Imagine giving up half our cars, energy, red meat, all of it - in a growing world. Emissions are still rising, so all of the scenarios we’re even considering assume that we’ll start removing carbon dioxide out of the air in massive quantities.”
Interested Citizen: “Phew, great plan. Glad we’re going to do that.”
IPCC: “Oh, we’re not. There’s no plan for how to do that. There aren’t any proven ways it could work on a large scale. We mentioned this in our last report, did you not read that?”
Interested Citizen: “Oh, I think I did, is that when you wrote:”
“All analysed pathways limiting warming to 1.5°C with no or limited overshoot use CDR to some extent to neutralize emissions from sources for which no mitigation measures have been identified and, in most cases, also to achieve net negative emissions to return global warming to 1.5°C following a peak (high confidence)”
IPCC: “Yes, exactly. We assume we’ll remove gigatons of CO2 from the atmosphere.”
Interested Citizen: “So let me get this straight. What you’re saying is this. 1) To have any hope of avoiding disaster scenarios, we have to remove gigatons of CO2 from the atmosphere. 2) We currently have zero plans for removing those gigatons of CO2.”
IPCC: “Yup.”
Interested Citizen: “So we’re fucked then.”
IPCC: “We prefer to say we have high confidence that all analysed pathways limiting....”
Interested Citizen: “Face-palm. IN PLAIN ENGLISH PLEASE!”
IPCC: “Ok, ok. To avoid widespread suffering, we need to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in massive quantities, and we have no proven ways to do that. So yes, the situation is grim.”
It might seem like my goal is to cause despair, but it isn’t.
It’s to enlist you in helping us get out of this mess.
At Project Vesta we’re working on a solution, a way to capture carbon dioxide cheaply and permanently store it in rocks. Nature already does this. For billions of years, rain falling on volcanic rocks has triggered a reaction that removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Our approach is to speed this up by taking a volcanic mineral, olivine, and spreading it in coastal areas to make green-sand beaches. There, natural wave action breaks it down and pulls carbon dioxide out of the air. This might seem unlikely, but it’s true: there’s 30 years of serious scientific research backing it up.
Our mission is to prove this method can be scaled, so it can be deployed all over the world and begin to capture a meaningful portion of human emissions, this decade. We’re a non-profit with an open-source approach, doing this for the planet.
We’ve just announced hitting a major milestone on our roadmap to take this out of the lab: our first pilot beach.
And you can help. We’re raising money to fund the project. We all contributed to causing climate change, and we can all do our part to reverse it. In fact, I would argue we all have a moral obligation to help reverse it. By making a donation, you can join the fight to turn the tide on climate change.
*Not actually the 8 millionth page