High-profile paper on “catastrophic” climate impacts echoes our “What Lies Beneath” analysis on fat-tail, existential risks and IPCC reticence, published four years ago
By David Spratt, Climate Code Red
There is a need to outline current knowledge about the likelihood of extreme climate change, discuss why understanding bad-to-worst cases is vital, articulate reasons for concern about catastrophic outcomes, define key terms, and put forward a research agenda.
Model-based net-zero scenarios, including those of the IPCC, aren’t worth the paper they are written on, say leading economists
By David Spratt, Climate Code Red
World-leading economists have blown a hole right through the middle of the main tool used to produce the net-zero scenarios embraced by climate policymakers.
1.5 degrees Paris climate target not ‘safe or appropriate’ given climate tipping point risks, ‘major rethink’ required: new report
By David Spratt, Ian Dunlop, Climate Code Red
Climate tipping points in the Antarctica, the Arctic and the Amazon are at risk of being reached before or at the current level of global warming of 1.2 degrees Celsius, requiring a “major rethink” of global climate goals and the action necessary to achieve them, according to a recent report.
With “net zero 2050” and the 1.5°C in the same breath, Glasgow reeks of cognitive dissonance
By David Spratt, Climate Code Red
One after another politicians, business leaders, journalists and NGO advocates talk about "net zero 2050" and the 1.5°C Paris goal in the same breath, and get away with it.
Central bankers’ “net zero 2050” scenarios fail on risk basics
By David Spratt, Ian Dunlop, Climate Code Red
This extract examines the “net zero 2050” (NZ2050) scenarios produced by the central bankers' Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS) and finds they are not adequately addressing the real risks and uncertainties of climate change.
Warning signs as global oil and gas giants adopt “Net zero 2050” climate goal
By David Spratt, Climate Code Red
When advocates support NZ2050 they are tacitly supporting a dangerous agenda leading up to COP 26 in Glasgow that will codify an unsustainable pathway with continuing high fossil fuel use, dangerous “offset” trade-offs, and unacceptable risks of unstoppable climate warming.
What roles for markets and for the state when climate risk is existential?
By David Spratt, Climate Code Red
The climate policymaking orthodoxy is that markets can efficiently price and mitigate climate risks, but this blog argues that when risks are existential — that is, a permanent and drastic curtailing of human civilisation’s future development — then the damages are beyond calculation.
Zero by 2050 or 2030? 1.5°C or 2°C? Overshoot or not? Demystifying carbon budgets.
By David Spratt, Climate Code Red
The Breakthough Briefing Note on "Carbon budgets for 1.5 & 2°C", released March 2, explores some of the myths and realities about the Paris Agreement targets and the associated carbon budgets, and what it would really take to achieve them.