You might remember a few weeks ago I made one of those ever so slightly apocalyptic videos
that I like to pop out every now and then. It was based on the second of three reports that make up
IPCC AR6, otherwise known as the Sixth Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change. The first two reports were pretty grim, I must admit. They told us that climate change
is already killing human beings, destroying nature and making the world a poorer place,
not just economically but environmentally as well, and that if we stayed on our current consumption
and greenhouse gas emissions trajectory then many parts of the planet will be pretty much
uninhabitable by the end of this century. So, you know, not ideal! But of course just pointing out
the problems is only half the job. You also need to bring a few solutions to the table as well.
And that's essentially what the third and final section of the Sixth Assessment Report,
which was published last week, attempts to do. So let's see what they've come up with shall we?
Hello and welcome to just have a think. The IPCC has been publishing comprehensive assessments
of the most up-to-date climate research every five or six years or so since 1990,
but this third part of their Sixth Assessment is actually the first time they've provided
an in-depth analysis of how the behaviours, choices and consumption of us humans could,
and I have to stress the word 'could', contribute to limiting global warming to that all-important
1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, above which the scientists tell us many of the
catastrophic consequences of climate change would become irreversible. Emissions of all the gases
that warm our atmosphere have been on a very significant upward trajectory since 1990. It's
not just carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels and changes in land use like deforestation,
it's the fluorinated gases that we use in things like refrigerators and air conditioners,
the nitrous oxide that comes predominantly from the fertilizers used in agriculture,
and it's the methane emissions from the belches of two billion cattle and other ruminant animals,
from leaks in natural gas pipelines and processing plants, and from the rapidly melting permafrost up
in the arctic where temperatures are rising two to three times faster than the global average.
Those increases obviously vary from region to region as this chart shows. If you just take
your numbers from 1990 then it's clearly Eastern Asia and predominantly China
that's been driving much of the increase in greenhouse gas emissions. But this second chart,
showing cumulative emissions since 1850, reveals that North America and Europe are responsible
for almost 40 percent of all historical emissions. So while the temptation to point
the finger and blame others may be very high, especially in our current geopolitical situation,
it's probably not a particularly fair or particularly helpful thing to do.
The critical question is what does the future hold and what do we need to do now?
The IPCC makes it very clear that if we follow the current set of global climate mitigation policies
then our kids and grandkids will see an average global surface temperature increase of about three
degrees above pre-industrial levels. That means more than a million species of animals and plants
going extinct on land and in our oceans towards the end of the century and more than a billion
human climate refugees attempting to migrate from uninhabitable areas to somewhere they can
actually survive, which may well lead to regional and international conflicts as 10 or 11 billion
human beings all fight over a rapidly decreasing amount of liveable space and an increasingly
limited supply of edible food and drinkable water. To give ourselves a greater than 50% chance of
avoiding that nightmare and limiting warming to the safe level of just 1.5 degrees Celsius above
pre-industrial levels, then global greenhouse gas emissions, or GHGs, will have to reach their peak
no later than 2025 say the IPCC. So that's less than three years from now. And the International
Energy Agency just told us that global CO2 emissions went up by another six percent in 2021
as we all bounced back from Covid. So our trend line's not looking too encouraging right now.
By 2030, less than eight years from now, the world needs to achieve a 48% decrease in carbon
dioxide emissions compared to 2019 levels to stay on target for 1.5 degrees of warming.
By 2040 we're looking at an 80% decrease in CO2 to stay on the 1.5 degrees pathway,
by which time we'll also need to reduce methane emissions by 44% compared to 2019 levels. Is this
looking challenging to you? Because it is to me! The slightly better news, according to the IPCC,
is that there's a range of tangible actions we can take to stop the runaway freight train.
They set out all these so-called mitigation options in a single chart focused on what can
actually be achieved by or before 2030. As well as the ability to be rapidly implemented this decade
the two other criteria that the IPCC apply are... number one, how big an impact will it have on the
problem? And number two, how much will it cost? So these numbers across the top represent how many
billions of tonnes of CO2 equivalent emissions could be avoided by the deployment of each method,
and these colours down here represent the cost of implementing each option. Blue bar costs are
'lower than the reference', which effectively means they're likely to be cheaper than the
current solution, which is a good thing. We're definitely looking for some blue bars here.
A yellow bar means it'll cost between 0 and 20 US dollars per tonne of CO2 equivalent emissions
avoided, and it goes right up to the dark red bar representing a cost of between a hundred
and two hundred dollars per tonne. The most immediate and obvious step will be to phase out
the burning of coal, oil and natural gas as soon as possible. That means no more new coal mines,
no more new fracking facilities, and no more new oil exploration. At the same time we need to be
transitioning very rapidly to what the IPCC call low emission energy sources. The clear winners
here are wind and solar energy. Their costs have dropped off a cliff in the last decade,
and in most parts of the world they're already competitive with or cheaper than fossil fuels.
So according to this chart we can get well over 2 billion tons of CO2 emissions reductions every
year with wind and solar with a net lifetime cost saving compared to existing fossil fuels.
Large-scale wind or solar farms can be implemented in months not years, so they're definitely a rapid
option as well. But of course they'll need the mass implementation of many of the innovations
we've looked at on this channel in previous videos like energy storage, interconnected smart grids,
demand side management, and integrated systems. None of the other forms of low emissions energy
come anywhere close, either on cost or on the amount of CO2 emissions they can avoid by 2030.
In some cases that may be because of geographical limitations, like with hydropower
and to a certain extent geothermal energy. And in the case of nuclear energy, high up front
costs and lengthy construction times, plus the longer term costs of storing radioactive waste,
mean it doesn't look like a good option on the 2030 timeline.
Just below nuclear power we've got carbon capture and storage or CCS, which no doubt many of you
have heard about, and which we've talked about before on this channel. Essentially it's the idea
that power plants in industry could continue with business as usual, processing and burning fossil
fuels but with extra machinery added to their exhaust stacks to capture the carbon dioxide,
which would then in theory be stored permanently underground. The trouble is these technologies are
not at all widespread. According to the Global CCS Institute there are only 27 facilities currently
operating anywhere in the world today. They removed about 70 million tons of CO2 in 2020.
Set that number against the more than 40,000 million tons that human activity currently spews
out annually, and you start to see why the IPCC aren't pitching it as any kind of silver bullet
for climate salvation. It's also very expensive as the dark red bars indicate on the chart.
It adds at least 20 percent to the cost of any power plant or industrial facility, so commercial
enterprises are not exactly rushing to adopt it as best practice. It will be an important technology
though, for those last few essential but very difficult to decarbonize industries like steel
and cement making. But even here we've already got carbon neutral alternative manufacturing processes
that have been developed to production scale and which could be rolled out very quickly
if political will existed. If we briefly zoom through the rest of the chart we can see that
there are massive, but not cheap, opportunities in agriculture forestry and other land use or AFOLU.
Regenerative agriculture and rewilding could sequester billions of tons of
carbon dioxide every year, starting pretty much immediately, as could reductions in deforestation
and increases in reforestation and carefully managed afforestation.
And of course all of us, especially in rich western nations, need to reduce our appalling
level of food waste and switch to diets that contain far less red meat, or even no meat at all.
There's a high variability in estimates of the costs here, which is why the bar is grey,
but there's no doubt about the benefits in terms of reduced greenhouse gases.
In buildings, just being more careful with the way we use energy is a zero cost,
or in many cases a cost saving measure, that could save a billion or so tons of CO2 a year globally.
Constructing modern energy efficient buildings and fully retrofitting existing buildings will
obviously be expensive, but again the reductions in emissions would be very significant indeed.
In green transport, all the options except biofuels are achievable at zero extra cost or a
cost saving over the lifetime of a vehicle, with a total annual CO2 reduction across the sector
of more than 3 billion tonnes. Industry has lots of opportunities and challenges
ahead. The benefits of energy and materials efficiency, and fuel switching, are clear.
But they'll all cost money, and arguably we'll need to see state incentives in place to encourage
these profit driven enterprises to make the rapid changes required. But the IPCC say even if we
deploy all these options successfully we'll still need to suck huge quantities of carbon dioxide
back out of our atmosphere as well if we stand any chance of keeping warming below 2 degrees Celsius.
It's a process known as Carbon Dioxide Removal or CDR, and the IPCC define it as
"anthropogenic activities that remove CO2 from the atmosphere and store it durably in geological,
terrestrial or ocean reservoirs, or in products". There's lots of potential methods for doing this,
but some, like reforestation and ocean alkalinization, will take decades to provide their
benefits. Direct Air Capture, or DACCS, is being hailed by some as the ultimate solution here,
but scaling up from the few thousand tonnes it captures today to the hundreds of billions
of tonnes it will need to capture to have any meaningful impact is by no means a given, and
it's only going to work if that captured carbon is genuinely sequestered underground like the folks
at Climeworks are doing in Icelandic basalt rocks, and not combined with hydrogen to be converted
back into hydrocarbon fuels, which is the business plan of the other two existing DACCS operators,
Carbon Engineering in Canada, and Global Thermostat in the United States.
So can we really limit global warming to only 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels?
Well the IPCC says it's still technically feasible on paper, but out here in the real world it's
looking extremely unlikely. Does that mean the human race will be extinct by mid-century and
our young folks should all be wallowing in a deep black pit of apathy and despair? No of course not!
Like everything else we bumbling humans do, we won't get everything right, and we'll probably
be playing catch-up for the rest of this century. But there is real progress in just about every
sector, and there's now a huge groundswell of momentum, not just in public opinion, but also
in the boardrooms of commercial organizations and financial institutions like banks, pension funds,
and insurance companies, all of whom now recognize the incontrovertible benefits
of robustly addressing the climate emergency, and the risks to their future balance sheets
and their livelihoods if they ignore the problem any longer.
And while all those rich westerners are transforming their business practices and
protecting their bottom lines, the IPCC reminds us that "accelerated financial support for developing
countries is a critical enabler to enhance mitigation actions and address inequities".
Back in 2009 all the rich nations pledged $100 billion a year in climate finance for
developing nations. But even now, 13 years later, They still haven't stumped up all the cash.
So I guess that'd be a pretty good place to start wouldn't it? That's it for this week. As always,
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