By Rupert Read, Marc Lopatin, Resilence.org
‘The public gets what the public wants’ sang a young Paul Weller on the 1979 hit Going Underground. It’s a lyric that doubles as our one-line summary of this week’s major report by the world’s leading climate scientists.
By Ian Angus, Climate and Capitalism
People and ecosystems least able to cope are being hardest hit by climate change, said scientists in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, released today.
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.
By Daisy Dunne, Carbon Brief
A key finding of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) new special report is that it is likely that some degree of “afforestation” will be needed to limit global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
By Simon Evans, Josh Gabbatiss, Carbon Brief
The world needs a “radical” shift towards renewables to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 and secure the 1.5C goal, says the International Energy Agency (IEA).
By James Dyke, Robert Watson, Wolfgang Knorr
Collectively we three authors of this article must have spent more than 80 years thinking about climate change. Why has it taken us so long to speak out about the obvious dangers of the concept of net zero?
By Dana Drugmand, DeSmog Blog
An unprecedented climate lawsuit brought by six Portuguese youths is to be fast-tracked at Europe’s highest court, it was announced yesterday.
By Marina Andrijevic, Joeri Rogelj, Carbon Brief
In our new analysis, published as a “policy forum” paper in the journal Science, we show that an opportunity for getting on a path to a 1.5C world can be seized if just a fraction of Covid-19 fiscal stimulus is invested annually in a “climate-positive” recovery.
By David Spratt, Climate Code Red
Just as four big oil and gas producers block the UN climate policymaking conference in Katowice, Poland from welcoming a report on the science of the 1.5 degree Celsius (°C) target which it had commissioned three years earlier in Paris, new evidence has emerged of the striking contradiction between word and deed at COP24.
By Kevin Anderson, Manchester Policy Blogs
The IPCC report meticulously lays out how the serious climate impacts of 1.5°C of warming are still far less destructive than those for 2°C. Sadly, the IPCC then fails, again, to address the profound implications of reducing emissions in line with both 1.5 and 2°C. Dress it up however we may wish, climate change is ultimately a rationing issue.
By Jessica Corbett, Common Dreams
Despite the Trump administration's own prediction that by the end of this century, the world could warm "a disastrous" 7°F, or about 4°C, above pre-industrial levels, the president has decided not to curb greenhouse gas emissions, but instead to use the devastating findings to justify and intensify his pro-fossil fuel agenda.
By Richard Heinberg, David Fridley, Resilience.org
In our view, at some point scientists and policy makers must begin discussing the one scenario that world leaders seem to want to avoid at all costs, i.e., managed economic contraction. The irony is that this scenario could reliably cut greenhouse gas emissions and is achievable without appeal to magic (CCS or decoupling).