The idea that any domestics policies are made at COPs is wrong
Domestic policies are made in legislatures, parliaments & power centers of sovereign nations
Paris corrected Kyoto’s flaw in this regard
Paris allows a public statement of pledges & reporting on progress
Many seem to believe that leaders of sovereign states can make policy, pledges or promises at COPs
They can’t
Don’t ask them to
Remember the goals of the Paris Agreement
To “strengthen the global response” since it, on its own is not a global response — action happens in sovereign nations
In pursuit of a higher order goal to limit global temperature increases to well below 2 C unfccc.int/sites/default/…
So what has Paris done?
Remarkably … it has now secured current pledges from nation’s around the world that would limit global T increase to 1.8C
Achieving that would be complete policy success under Paris
Pledges are not success, but pledges are all Paris can secure. . .
All of the actual policy action - meaning promulgation, approval & implementation of actual climate policies - occurs in between COPs & within sovereign states
Paris foresees this & is centered on a mechanism of reporting and accountability under what are called NDCs
In terms of securing pledges, the Paris Agreement has done its job
Shining a bright light on progress with respect to NDCs & even ratcheting them forward will continue to be important of course
But the center of gravity on climate policy is (and always has been) in nations
Now here is something to consider
With current pledges the 2C target is well in sight
Unlike death & taxes, pledges are not guarantees
But still, it is in sight
This helps to explain the mad rush by advocates to move the goalposts from 2C to 1.5C
Policy success is a concern
Accompanying the target shift has been a corresponding evolution of the threshold-of-catastrophe
Once it was 5C that was catastrophe, then 4C
Today the onset of catastrophe is often set at 3C
And some are even saying 2C is catastrophe
It won’t be long that 1.5C plays that role
There’s no problem with nation’s revisiting the Paris Agreement and reinterpreting 1.5C as a target rather than an aspiration
They haven’t yet
My advice is to move away from T target advocacy (abstract & inscrutable) and on to net-zero pledge advocacy (intuitive & obvious)
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The biggest news in the Global Carbon Budget 2021 is a very large downward revision in CO2 emissions from land use
The downward revision is about the same size as the total emissions of CO2 from fossil fuels from the EU17 or India
Of course caveats about uncertainties . . .
Compared to when I went to sleep last night, our perception of the magnitude of the net-zero challenge just improved (it is stull huge, but less huger than we thought)
I'm lecturing in class today on this brilliant paper by Mike Hulme
"Climate reductionism is the means by which the knowledge claims of the climate modelers are transferred, by proximity as it were, to the putative knowledge claims of the social, economic, and political analysts"
Hulme observes, correctly, that climate reductionism can be found in the scenarios of the IPCC which fix society and vary climate ... this is common in the climate impacts literature (eg, when adaptation is ignored)
We see climate reductionism in the IPCC15 report where societal impacts of 1.5C are compared to 2C (as reported yesterday by NYT below)
Little known is that almost all of these differences in impacts occur under scenarios that ignore human adaptation ... as if
The publication today of the 2021 FCCC NDCs reinforces the utter implausibility of CMIP/IPCC baseline scenarios (7.0, 8.5) unfccc.int/sites/default/…
It also should mark the last time anyone cites Schwalm et al 2020 to defend RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5 as BAU (or even as plausible)
Absolutely huge news
UN FCCC expectations for 2030 GHG emissions
2016 INDCs = 62.0 Gt CO2-eq
2021 NDCs = 51.5 Gt CO2-eq
Net-zero is a massive challenge, of course, but compared to 5 years ago the world is now in a much better position that was expected unfccc.int/sites/default/…
Another systemic misuse of the RCP scenarios involves using RCP8.5 as a reference scenario and the others as mitigation scenarios in impacts, economic or policy studies
RCP creators warned against doing this when RCPs were created
But it is found everywhere, including IPCC
Scenario experts foresaw that this type of misuse was getting baked into the RCP methodology, drawing 4 scenarios from different models and renaming them as if they were comparable (when they weren’t)
The desire for RCP pathways of radiative forcing overrode considerations of the proper use of scenarios for impacts, economics, policy research
The perceived needs of climate modeling were explicitly expressed as the priority
🧵
Why are climate scientists so mad at me?
Here's one answer
For almost 30 yrs I've been writing abt the conflicts between (a) the special interests of the climate science community and (b) the broader social responsibilities of this community
Pretty normal STS fare ... read on
My 1994 PhD dissertation was an evaluation of the then newly-created US Global Change Research Program link.springer.com/content/pdf/10…
I argued that the USGCRP would do a lot of good science but have limited policy relevance (a conclusion later reached by a @theNASEM study)
I was a post-doc at NCAR when this paper came out
It resulted in a furor
NSF funded NCAR & the program officer who oversaw NSF funding was central to creation of USGCRP
My job was threatened
A huge debate ensued
UCAR leaders pushed back on the pressure
I kept my job
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