Five facts that the climate scientists of the IPCC wanted you to know that the petro-states successfully lobbied to bury or fudge. 1/
This weeks report is the product of a long negotiation in which all the governments of the world horse trade.
Luckily there are minutes kept of who vetoed what. Some of it is important but not critical 👇
Some of it is absolutely vital to how the urgent need for action is framed.
For example some countries wanted to give greater prominence to the agreed fact that global emissions must peak and start coming down in under three years. The Saudis nixed that.
I've just finished the latest #IPCCReport. It's written in the usual barely comprehensible climate wonk speak. But behind the jargon there's a blueprint that seems as revolutionary now as Das Kapital must have in 1867...
The climate scientists don't do anything like call for the overthrow of the capitalist classes. But they use science to point to how society has to be re-ordered from top to bottom.
e.g. If we want to keep warming below 1.5 global emissions will need to peak in 2025 – three years
And if you want to do that then they say you must also reduce coal consumption by 95%, oil by 60% and gas by 45% by 2050.
And because we will need some fossil fuels for feedstocks etc this means electricity must transform to 100% renewable ... starting immediately.
This is quite a slap in the face from Brussels for Ireland's care for the environment. It comes from the Director in charge of environmental implementation at the Commission speaking at a recent online conference.
Thread ...
Journalist Murray Sayle wrote this piece about #BloodySunday just 5 days after the murders. It was spiked by Sunday Times editor Harold Evans, but fifty years on remains an astonishingly accurate account of what the Army was up to. lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v24/…
Perhaps it was telling that it took a man from a colonised country (Australia) to recognise the British Army account for the tissue of lies that it was. And it was an unforgivably supine decision of Evans to not run the piece. Sayle did the right thing and resigned
Evans decision to withhold Sayle's research from the Widgery Tribunal doubtless also made the whitewash easier, though there was the troubling question of protecting sources. How different the course of The Troubles might have been.
Four climate experts have just made statements to the Oireachtas Environment & Climate Action Committee which is considering Carbon Budgets. Some of their analysis really raises fundamental questions about whether we are getting this right at all. In no particular order ...
Ireland is subsidising fossil fuels to the tune of €2.4bn a year (CSO, 2019). At COP26 we agreed to start phasing those out, but for now Ireland plans only to produce a road map for cutting subsidies in 2024.
- Prof John Sweeney
Ireland is wealthy, educated, low population density, with great renewables potential, but according to SEAI only 11% of our energy is green. In other words 90% of it is unsustainable and we have failed to reduce our emissions since 1990.
- Prof Kevin Anderson @KevinClimate
What scientists are projecting will happen to the Thwaites Glacier in the next three to five years should be front page news everywhere today.
Short thread.
The Thwaites Glacier (roughly the size of Britain) is mostly held in place by a massive shelf of ice that slows its flow in to the sea.
That ice shelf is like a chair jammed under a door handle. But now it is beginning to slip allowing the door to open.
Warmer waters are effectively melting the ice from underneath as this @nytimes graphic illustrates.