With great fanfare and much media mind manipulation, the IPCC has released its long-awaited AR6 report. Surprise, surprise it is all much worse than we thought – or is it?
There are a couple of statements that our local and national politicians should think very seriously about.
In general, no likelihood is attached to the scenarios assessed in this Report.
IPCC (Emphasis added)
So they are specifically saying that they do not have a “favourite” prediction about the future climate conditions. They go on to expand on this by saying:
When exploring various climate futures, scenarios with no, or no additional, climate policies are often referred to as ‘baseline’ or ‘reference scenarios’ (Section 1.6.1.1; Annex VII: Glossary). Among the five core scenarios used most in this report, SSP3-7.0 and SSP5-8.5 are explicit ‘no-climate-policy’ scenarios (Gidden et al., 2019; Cross-Chapter Box 1.4, Table 1), assuming a carbon price of zero. These future ‘baseline’ scenarios are hence counterfactuals that include less climate policies compared to ‘business-as-usual’ scenarios – given that ‘business-as-usual’ scenarios could be understood to imply a continuation of existing climate policies. Generally, future scenarios are meant to cover a broad range of plausible futures, due for example to unforeseen discontinuities in development pathways (Raskin and Swart, 2020), or to large uncertainties in underlying long-term projections of economic drivers (Christensen et al., 2018). However, the likelihood of high emission scenarios such as RCP8.5 or SSP5-8.5 is considered low in light of recent developments in the energy sector (Hausfather and Peters, 2020a, 2020b)
IPCC (Emphasis added)
So, the politicians’ favourite scare scenario, RCP8.5, has a low likelihood and is NOT a BAU (business as usual) scenario. It is an explicit no-climate-policy outcome.
As we know, there is no shortage of climate policies.
My challenge to all readers and every politician in this country is to find one future prediction woven into local or central government actions and policies that is NOT based on RCP8.5 being the most likely future event to plan for.
Some examples:
Swap “Bay of Plenty” for “Otago” for the exact same report down south.
And so on …
So the question is: Will the politicians and their bureaucratic advisors now “follow the science” and alter all the policies, guidelines and projections in the light of this new IPCC position?
We will continue with bankrupting our economy, wasting money worrying about a scenario that has a low likelihood because it was never about the science or reality, it has always been about politics, power and control.
Councils will continue to draw lines on people’s LIM maps to show coastal inundation and erosion based on RCP8.5, devaluing their properties or potentially making the property uninsurable and thus unsaleable.
Please share so others can discover The BFD.