Climate Change: a final, final very last final warning

By Richard North - March 21, 2023

Well, it doesn’t look as if the world is about to end, from a banking perspective. Although the UBS buyout of Credit Suisse has caused some perturbation in the financial markets, it hasn’t set of a tidal wave of bank runs – or even gentle strolls.

Although you never truly know with these things as we could be looking at a slow burn, the gnomes of Zurich seem to have done enough to live another day.

That is not the case with the planet as a whole, though – not if UN secretary general, António Guterres is to be believed. This he conveyed in what he cast as the scientists’ “final warning” on the so-called climate crisis, as he introduced yesterday the “Synthesis Report” as part of the IPCC’s sixth assessment report.

As always, this highly political body (the IPCC) has produced the summary version of its claims. In previous times, this has not always matched up with the substantive reports, but by this means the panel is able to harvest all the doom-laden headlines, evading detailed scrutiny.

By the time the dogs have barked, and the media caravan has moved on, the detailed “science” has been consigned to the darkest recesses of the internet, the URLs changed beyond all recognition, making it accessible to only the most persistent of followers.

All we need to know is that this “comprehensive review of human knowledge of the climate crisis” which has taken hundreds of scientists eight years to compile, running to thousands of pages, boils down to one short message: “act now, or it will be too late”.

Guterres, punches the message home, saying: “This report is a clarion call to massively fast-track climate efforts by every country and every sector and on every timeframe. Our world needs climate action on all fronts: everything, everywhere, all at once”.

But even if this report were not an intensely political production (which it is), it is certainly being treated in a political matter. For a brief moment, the BBC was running it as lead item on its news website, elevating it to top of the bill on the 6pm television news bulletin.

It was joined by the left-leaning press, with the Guardian also giving it temporarily the top slot, declaring that: “Scientists deliver ‘final warning’ on climate crisis: act now or it’s too late”, telling us that IPCC report “says only swift and drastic action can avert irrevocable damage to world”.

The like-minded Independent ran with a parallel theme, headlining: “How to defuse a climate time-bomb: World’s scientists say 1.5C still achievable but ‘humanity on thin ice’”.

The IPCC report, we were told, “amounts to the most clear-eyed, up-to-date assessment of the climate crisis: how it’s affecting all corners of the world and its systems, and how humanity is faring in its attempts to mitigate disasters and adapt to those that are now unavoidable”.

On the other hand, the unashamedly right wing Telegraph has buried its report so deep that it was no longer visible on its website at the time of writing, leaving the field to the thinking man’s idiot, Matthew Lynn, with a column headed: “The UN’s ‘scientific’ climate report is nothing more than confected hysteria”.

The centerish Times has submerged its report so deeply in its recesses that it is difficult to find (although a report does appear on the front page of the print edition), leaving the Financial Times to do the honours with a piece headed: “Global warming of 1.5C in sight and will hit 3 present generations, UN reports”.

From a British perspective, of course, the IPCC’s timing is execrable. Today is the day that the report on the Metropolitan Police is published, making the story the lead in most print editions.

The Guardian is running: “Met police found to be institutionally racist, misogynistic and homophobic”. Confronted with such a juicy opportunity to address its favourite subjects, even this paper has decided that the end of the world can wait its turn.

Had this story not been dominating the news agenda, Armageddon would still be having to compete with Johnson’s oral evidence to the privileges committee, due tomorrow. The same day has also been chosen by Sunak for the Commons debate on his Windsor thingy, thus marginalising the embattled DUP which is to be shunted into the branch line of history. The end of the world doesn’t stand a chance.

That said, if politics is the art of the possible, the international politicians behind the UN report are not very good at their calling. Boss man Guterres is telling the rich nations (which still includes the UK) that they “must commit to reaching net zero [greenhouse gas emissions] as close as possible to 2040”, instead of the 2050 deadline they have already signed up to.

Other countries are allowed to follow suit, keeping to the original target of 2050 – even China when it has stopped building coal-fired power stations.

Back in the real world, The Times has reported recently that the UK is already “off track” for its net-zero targets, something we discussed a little earlier, coming to the conclusion that the current targets are fantasy.

Despite scientists having delivered their “final warning” on the climate crisis, telling us that rising greenhouse gas emissions are push the world to the brink of irrevocable damage and only “swift and drastic action” can avert this supposedly man-made disaster, the IPCC is away with the fayries if it believes Western governments can be dragooned into speeding up their responses.

As for the likes of China, India and most African nations, net-zero remains a largely theoretical concept which, like a rainbow, will disappear as you get closer to it.

Nevertheless, according to the BBC, the UK government has responded positively to the IPCC report, saying that it makes it clear that countries must “work towards far more ambitious climate commitments” ahead of the UN climate summit COP28 in November.

An unnamed spokesperson asserted: “The UK is a world leader in working towards net-zero, but we need to go further and faster”, presumably escaping the building in his or her electric vehicle without getting lynched. Those who continue to promote more action will certainly need to go “further and faster” from real people, to avoid the inevitable fallout from promoting their obsession.

But, if the current obsession is with the “institutionally racist, misogynistic and homophobic” Metropolitan Police, at least they are taking the forthcoming end of the world more seriously on the other side of the pond.

The Wall Street Journal, for instance, headlines: “Time Is Running Out to Curb Global Warming, U.N. Panel Report Says”, warning that the world’s nations must together cut greenhouse-gas emissions 60 percent by 2035 to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius over preindustrial levels.

But, in an acknowledgment of the reality, this paper tells us that the level of cuts being advocated “would require a massive and rapid shift in the world’s energy supply”, noting that this has been stifled by the war in Ukraine, the global energy crisis and thirst for economic growth in countries like China and India.

Slapping us firmly on our collective wrist, we have Benjamin Poulter, an earth scientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre, asserting, “We are seeing the science and the projections now starting to come true”, adding that, “The impacts are accelerating in a much quicker way, but at the same time, society has done absolutely nothing to stop the growth of greenhouse gas emissions. And so we’re seeing these projections play out now in real time”.

Global greenhouse-gas emissions, we are told, reached record levels in 2022 and are projected to continue their upward trajectory, which nevertheless seems to make a 2040 target something of a forlorn hope. On the face of it, reforming the Metropolitan Police might be a marginally easier task, although it could prove to be a close-run thing.