The U.N.’s ‘Final Warning’ about Climate Change Won’t Be the Last

T he U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released an assessment report eight years in the making on Monday, and one climate scientist billed it as the “final warning” that catastrophic climate change is imminent.

U.N. Secretary General António Guterres was no less apocalyptic. Deeming the IPCC’s report a “clarion call” and a “survival guide for humanity,” Guterres asked “every country and every sector” to “fast-track climate efforts” on “every timeframe.” (By “every timeframe,” we can assume he didn’t mean the slow ones.) “If we act now,” Guterres allowed, “we can still secure a livable, sustainable future for all.” But it doesn’t require an especially close reading of the IPCC’s findings to conclude that its authors believe saving “humanity” is now a remote prospect.

According to the AR6 Synthesis Report, which contains no new data but collects previous findings in one place, average global temperatures have already risen by 1.1 degrees Celsius (two degrees Fahrenheit) since the Industrial Revolution. The odds that humanity can stave off an increase of another .4 degrees Celsius or more, and thus avoid crossing a threshold that climate scientists believe to be significant, are almost nil. “If governments just stay on their current policies, the remaining carbon budget will be used up before the next IPCC report,” said Greenpeace International policy adviser Kaisa Kosonen.

For the roughly 3.5 billion human beings who reside in areas the IPCC deems “highly vulnerable” to climate-change-related disasters, that’s bad news. They will face “acute food insecurity and reduced water security.” Already, “human mortality from floods, droughts, and storms” is on the rise, and that trend will accelerate. Mass-mortality events and species loss will continue, threatening interdependent ecosystems. Eventually, the Arctic permafrost will melt, releasing trapped greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and contributing to a runaway cycle of ecological devastation. The eschaton will be particularly bad for the “economically and socially marginalized,” with profound ramifications for “gender and social equity.”

So, what are policy-makers supposed to do to avert all this impending doom? The first step would be to mothball coal-fired power plants and cancel plans for any new ones. But China is building the equivalent of two new coal-fired plants per week and shows no signs of slowing down, so that’s not going to happen.

The world can and should commit to reforestation and the cultivation of carbon-absorbing vegetation like peat moss. Yet, as the Guardian admits, “no amount of tree planting will be enough to cancel out the effects of continued fossil fuel emissions.” We’re starting to run out of options.

What about promising new ways of removing carbon from the atmosphere — so-called “carbon capture and storage (CCS)” technologies? The IPCC holds out hope for them while noting that they’re still in the developmental stages and remain cost-prohibitive. That’s a diplomatic description of what looks less like a panacea and more like a boondoggle every day.

Under Joe Biden, the U.S. Department of Energy launched a five-year, $3.5 billion program to build four regional Direct Air Capture hubs designed to harness and store CO₂ underground. An Iceland-based hub that serves as proof of concept captures around 4,000 tons of CO₂ per year, but that barely registers compared with the estimated 36.8 billion tons of energy-related global emissions produced each year.

And it gets bleaker still. Some firms are investing in carbon-capture technologies to purchase “carbon offsets,” a scheme that commodifies emissions reductions to justify the claim that its existing emissions are effectively “net zero.” According to one recent study, however, the carbon-offset-market registries are “systematically over-crediting projects and delivering dubious carbon offsets.” Indeed, offsets have allowed some environmentally disruptive industries — logging, for example — to engage in unsustainable practices while taking credit for reducing emissions.

So, maybe there is no salvation for mankind, but there’s still time for the world to engineer what Guterres calls a “just transition” toward the hellscape of the future. If that phrase made you reach for your wallet, it should have. The U.N. identifies as one feature of a “just transition” a global commitment to tripling investments in renewable-energy sources so that they reach “at least $4 trillion dollars a year.” Of course, that’s nothing compared to the $551 trillion in economic damages one report associated with a potential 3.7-degree Celsius rise in average temperatures. For reference, Axios observes that “$551 trillion is more than all the wealth currently existing in the world.” In that sense, $4 trillion is a bargain, really.

Moreover, the transition will involve a massive transfer of wealth from the developed to the developing world. “Wealthy governments have failed to provide $100 billion of climate finance a year they promised to developing countries by 2020, with the U.S. responsible for the vast majority of the shortfall,” read one IPCC-inspired indictment of the industrialized world. “It is a huge injustice,” declared Aditi Mukherji, one of the IPCC report’s 93 authors. “Climate justice is crucial because those who have contributed least to climate change are being disproportionately affected.”

In sum, the Earth is all but certain to cross the threshold past which global warming becomes unsustainable. There are no effective technological remedies for this condition, and there’s even less resolve to pursue such remedies. Nevertheless, the world’s wealthiest countries should continue to deindustrialize and give away huge sums of money to the governments of developing states, which have even less regard for sustainable resource management and instead devote their energies to — you guessed it — economic development.

The good news in the IPCC’s assessment is that it is likely subject to change, just as prior catastrophic predictions were. If climate scientists’ predictions were always accurate, the Arctic would be “nearly ice-free” today. The IPCC’s 2001 assessment anticipated a decline in the global severity of snowstorms, which did not materialize. The 2007 IPCC AR4 report predicted that rainfall shortages around the world would reduce agricultural yields by up to 50 percent. That didn’t happen, either. It also forecasted the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers — an assessment that was later retracted when it was revealed that the source on which it was based had not undergone peer review.

This is the context climate-change alarmists want you to compartmentalize when they say “we should be hysterical,” as New York Times reporter Helene Cooper recommended in 2018 after the IPCC warned that mankind had just twelve years to stave off “devastating” global warming. But that prediction was itself a product of revised estimates about how much warming was already locked in.

So we can rest assured of at least one thing: There will be many more “final warnings” in our future.