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‘Carbon Neutral’ Fossil Fuel That Doesn’t Exist
Energy companies are
starting to pitch the idea that planet-warming natural gas can be
erased by paying villagers to protect forests. Experts can’t make
the math work.
![](images/images_08_11_2021/Pic1.jpg)
Volunteers clear
vegetation that would otherwise stoke wildfires in forests around
their village near Mbire, Zimbabwe. Their work is funded, in part,
by the sale of fossil fuel thousands of miles away.
Photographer: Cynthia Matonhodze/Bloomberg
By Stephen Stapczynski,Akshat R athi, and Godfrey Marawanyika
August 10, 2021, 9:01 PM PDT
The junior traders at
TotalEnergies SE were essentially winging it last September by
orchestrating the French energy giant’s first shipment of
“carbon-neutral” natural gas. It’s the greenest-possible designation
for fossil fuel and an important step in making the company’s core
product more palatable in a warming world. Nailing down the deal
involved googling and guesswork.
Listen to this story.
Total had proposed the trade after learning a client had already
purchased two carbon-neutral cargos from rivals at Royal Dutch Shell
Plc, according to people with knowledge of the deal who asked not to
be named discussing a private transaction. One of these insiders
said that only after getting the go-ahead did the inexperienced team
attempt to figure out how to neutralize the emissions contained in a
hulking tanker full of liquified natural gas. Their first step was
to search the internet for worthy environmental projects that might
offset the pollution.
![](images/images_08_11_2021/Pic2.jpg)
‘This whole bush can be
razed to the ground if we don’t do what we’re doing,’ says Kembo
Magonyo, one of the volunteers.
Photographer: Cynthia Matonhodze/Bloomberg
Thousands of miles away, a Zimbabwean volunteer named Kembo Magonyo
would spend the spring months clearing stubborn jumbles of branches
near the thickly forested border with Mozambique. Wildfires tend to
leap between the two countries, laying waste to trees before anyone
can respond. “This whole bush can be razed to the ground if we don’t
do what we’re doing,” Magonyo says, hacking away with his machete.
His work is organized by a group partly funded by Total’s
carbon-neutral deal.
In the complicated new math of climate solutions, villagers clearing
brush in southern Africa can end up redefining networks of global
commerce worth billions of dollars. Environmental projects stand as
shadow partners to emission-heavy energy trades happening far away.
What Total’s gas cargo puts into the atmosphere, the
machete-wielding villagers will remove. That’s the theory.
Explore dynamic updates of the earth’s key data points
Open the Data Dash.
But to make it work Total’s pioneers of carbon neutrality first
needed to find green projects capable of meeting two requirements:
generate carbon credits backed by an international organization,
without costing too much. After struggling to come up with an
answer, the team set up a meeting with South Pole, a project
developer based in Zurich that came recommended by rival traders.
That’s how $600,000 from a $17 million LNG transaction ended up, in
part, paying for forest protection in Zimbabwe.
The resulting trade looks like a win for everyone. Total kept its
promise to investors to shrink its carbon footprint. Impoverished
communities received financial support. And the buyer, China
National Offshore Oil Corp., cited the shipment as one of the steps
it’s taking to “provide green, clean energy to the nation.” But
climate experts and even a crucial organizer behind the deal say it
will do virtually nothing to decrease carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere, falling far short of neutral.
“The claim that you can market the sale of fossil fuels as carbon
neutral because of a meager few dollars you put into tropical
conservation is not a defensible claim,” says Danny Cullenward, a
Stanford University lecturer and policy director at CarbonPlan, a
nonprofit group that analyzes climate solutions for impact.
At best, Cullenward says, efforts to prevent deforestation by
stopping wildfires can only avoid additional heat-trapping gas
released when trees burn. Rural villagers can’t do anything to
counteract the large-scale pollution from natural gas, other than
making energy traders and consumers feel good for supporting green
causes in regions where money is scarce.
Total said in a statement that it conducts due diligence on offset
projects and confirmed that it split the cost of offsets in the LNG
transaction with Cnooc. The French company declined to discuss
details, including prices paid for carbon credits, citing a
non-disclosure agreement. Cnooc didn’t respond to requests seeking
comment. Total also said it doesn’t count carbon credits in its
companywide emissions reports or as part of its plan to reach net
zero by 2050. “While an important tool,” the company said,
“offsetting cannot be considered as a substitute for direct
emissions reductions by corporates, but as a complement.”
Energy Giants Sell
'Carbon Neutral' Natural Gas That Doesn't Exist
WATCH: Energy Giants Sell 'Carbon Neutral' Natural Gas That Doesn't
Exist
The use of scientifically defined terms like “carbon neutral” and
“net zero” in marketing language introduces additional confusion.
Both terms mean balancing any emissions added to the atmosphere with
an equivalent amount of removal. Most experts agree that avoiding
deforestation isn’t the same as removing greenhouse gases. “This
paradigm,” warns Cullenward, “is encouraging a fictitious engine
that doesn’t help advance our net-zero goals.”
That view isn’t reserved for outside critics. The leader of South
Pole, which helped develop the Zimbabwe project and sold its carbon
credits to Total, doesn’t believe forest protection can rectify
pollution from natural gas. “It’s such obvious nonsense,” says Renat
Heuberger, co-founder of South Pole. “Even my 9-year-old daughter
will understand that’s not the case. You’re burning fossil fuels and
creating CO₂ emissions.”
![](images/images_08_11_2021/Pic3.jpg)
By safeguarding forests
from the flames, Carbon Green Africa says its volunteers are storing
carbon dioxide in the form of trees.
Photographer: Cynthia Matonhodze/Bloomberg
Total’s product started warming the planet at the moment of
extraction from the deep-sea Ichthys field off the Australian coast.
Every part of its lifecycle generated greenhouse gas. Sending the
gas to an export facility through an 890-kilometer (553-mile)
pipeline risked leakage of methane, a powerful pollutant that traps
80 times more heat than CO₂ in its first two decades. Chilling the
gas into a liquid for shipping wrought additional emissions. Even
the tanker that brought the LNG to Shenzhen in southern China burned
some of the fuel while sailing.
At the final destination, after Cnooc claimed the cargo last
September, the LNG was likely burned to power the city’s countless
factories or an electricity grid serving more than 12 million
people. This would leave a centuries-long residue of atmospheric CO₂
that Total’s traders had to neutralize. But how much? Total and
Cnooc agreed to set the shipment’s emissions at 240,000 metric tons
of CO₂, the same amount of pollution generated by 30,000 U.S.
households in a year.
![](images/images_08_11_2021/Pic4.jpg)
The Ichthys LNG terminal in Darwin,
Australia, one of the first steps in the long journey made by
Total’s supposedly ‘carbon neutral’ natural gas.
Source: Copernicus Sentinel-2 Satellite Image; Sept. 11, 2020
The figure is, at best, a rough estimate
since there are too many variables. “No one has convincingly
produced an accurate calculation,” says Fauziah Marzuki, an analyst
at research group BloombergNEF. “All of these deals are making
assumptions.”
If Total’s team started out as rookies at carbon math, South Pole’s
experts arrived as old hands. The company has been generating
credits for more than 15 years—long before the corporate world took
interest in their emissions-erasing power—and today operates in
dozens of countries. Over virtual meetings, according to people
familiar with the transaction, South Pole’s sales representatives
laid out options. The cheapest offsets they had were tied to support
for renewable energy projects, while the most expensive helped fund
reforestation efforts to plant new trees.
Enough carbon credits to offset a shipment of LNG can cost anywhere
between $1 million to $15 million, according to Eurasia Group, a New
York-based think tank. Most trades fall on the lower end of the
spectrum, in terms of cost and quality. Traders in Asia who have
participated in similar deals say the offsets involved usually sell
for less than $6 per ton of CO₂.
“We’ve been hearing low single digits,” in terms of what companies
pay per ton, says Lucy Cullen, an analyst with energy consultant
Wood Mackenzie Ltd. “It makes sense from a commercial standpoint.”
By comparison, Bill Gates said in an interview earlier this year
that he pays about $600 a ton to suck carbon out of the air using
cutting-edge technologies, as a way to offset his personal carbon
footprint.
Pollution Breakdown
Combustion makes up the lion's share of emissions in the LNG value
chain
Source: BloombergNEF
Total decided to source the bulk of its offsets from the Hebei
Guyuan Wind Farm Project, located in a Chinese steel-making province
surrounding Beijing. A similar logic linked the wind farm and the
forest-fire prevention in Zimbabwe. In this case the electricity
generated by the wind turbines would theoretically avoid use of
Hebei’s dirty coal-fired power plants. The resulting reduction in
emissions, compared to an alternative scenario in which only coal
electricity had been used, would form the basis for neutralizing
Total’s gas deal.
Total chose to add additional credits from the project in Zimbabwe’s
Kariba region, which South Pole co-developed with Carbon Green
Africa. Those credits cost more than those from the Chinese wind
farm but on average amounted to less than $3 a ton, according to the
people familiar with the deal. Total declined to comment, citing the
non-disclosure agreement.
![](images/images_08_11_2021/Pic5.jpg)
Hebei is a steel-making Chinese province
just north of Beijing where coal power plants operate alongside wind
turbines.
Photographer: Yang Shiyao/Xinhua/Getty Images
Did the money from the deal help lower emissions in China? The Hebei
wind farm has been generating clean energy for over a decade, and
it’s unlikely it would have ceased doing so without several hundred
thousand dollars from Total and Cnooc, says Gilles Dufrasne, policy
officer at nonprofit Carbon Market Watch.
Verra, the organization that certified the Hebei credits used in the
Total deal, has since updated its policies to exclude large-scale
grid-connected renewables. If the wind farm’s operators tried to
register as an offset project today, “it would not be accepted,”
says Dufrasne.
When climate scientists think about offsets, a key concept they
grapple with is called “additionality.” You only balance the carbon
scale if you actually remove CO₂ that wouldn’t have been absorbed
without your support. It’s an extremely tricky concept that’s prone
to abuse. After all, how do you prove that something worse would
have happened if you hadn’t intervened?
Carbon Green Africa, the organizer of the Zimbabwe effort backed by
South Pole and Total, is working to defend a 785,000-hectare
wildlife corridor across four provinces. Volunteers are told that
keeping fires at bay is about more than protecting crops and
livestock. It’s part of a global mission to arrest global
temperatures. By safeguarding forests from the flames, the project
is supposed to be keeping CO₂ stored in the form of trees.
But projects like this have become a point of contention. They’re
based on a framework known as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation
and Forest Degradation (REDD+), a program started under the auspices
of the United Nations. The initial goal was to help governments
trade offsets with each other so that rich countries might
financially support climate action by developing nations. After
political leaders couldn’t agree on how the system should work,
project developers started marketing the offsets directly to
corporations.
Even if work to combat deforestation can’t counteract an LNG
shipment, corporate patronage has helped improve life in Mbire, one
of the districts in Zimbabwe that’s home to volunteers in the
forest-protection project. More than a dozen residents spoke
positively about the program during a visit by a Bloomberg Green
reporter earlier this year.
Theresa Mutseura, a health administrator at the Chitsungo Mission
Hospital, said the project helped set up a biogas digester to power
the 65-bed facility. The only hospital in a region with 33,000
people and just two doctors had previously relied on firewood.
Zvionere Chaku, 43, said volunteers with Carbon Green taught her how
to farm more expensive vegetables in a small garden rather than
clearing land.
![](images/images_08_11_2021/Pic6.jpg)
Zvionere Chaku tends to a vegetable garden
in Mbire, Zimbabwe.
Photographer: Cynthia Matonhodze/Bloomberg
Benefits of the program can be measured.
The region lost about 0.23% of its tree cover between 2011 and 2020,
according to analysis of satellite images by Global Forest Watch,
compared with a rate of 0.65% before the project began. Economic
growth has also been stronger in the districts covered by the
project compared with similar areas, according to gross domestic
product figures provided by the local government.
Last year Carbon Green paid Z$215 million ($2.5 million) to Mbire,
with the bulk of the funding going to infrastructure projects such
as roads and schools that help boost development. About 20% goes
directly to environmental protection. “The money was a windfall,”
says Tarcisius Mahuni, who runs the local district council from an
office decorated in posters for the REDD+ program. The funds from
carbon credits were more than triple what local officials had hoped
to collect in tax revenue.
![](images/images_08_11_2021/Pic7.jpg)
Theresa Mutseura works at the Chitsungo
Mission Hospital, the only facility serving a population of 33,000.
Internet connectivity is so bad that the physicians sometimes have
to leave mid-procedure to look up medical information online.
Photographer: Cynthia Matonhodze/Bloomberg
Mbire’s improving infrastructure must also contend with impacts from
warming temperatures, made worse by the use of fossil fuel. “We have
had droughts, floods, cyclones, hunger and diseases,” says Charles
Ndondo, Carbon Green’s managing director who oversees local
operations. “If I was not worried about climate change, I would not
be running this project.”
This puts on display an uncomfortable truth about the global climate
movement: powerful multinational companies can essentially outsource
the cleanup of their pollution to faraway places in need of help for
a fraction of their profits. Doing so is far cheaper than direct
means of removing pollution from their businesses. Carbon Green says
the project in Zimbabwe avoids 6.5 million tons of carbon emissions
each year while getting, at most, $1.50 per ton; sometimes the group
gets paid as little as $0.20.
Heuberger, the co-founder of South Pole, stands by the sale of
credits to support the work in Zimbabwe. But it troubles him that
Total is using offsets to market natural gas as carbon neutral. His
company tells clients they should use such offsets to “take
responsibility” for their emissions, not to make claims that they
have neutralized ongoing pollution. In a statement, Total said South
Pole never raised objections over using the term “carbon neutral.”
In a way, it comes down to semantics. As corporate climate action
grows more complex, so do the norms around net-zero goals. There’s
growing consensus among top companies that the cheap and abundant
credits used by Total—called avoided emissions offsets—should not be
used to claim progress towards net zero. That’s why executives are
increasingly turning to the phrase “carbon neutral” as a compromise.
The term is gaining cache as a way for companies to take credit for
supporting environmental projects, even if they haven’t actually
removed CO₂ from the atmosphere.
Paltry Offering
Less than 5% of offsets actually remove carbon dioxide from the
atmosphere
Source: TSVCM inventory analysis for 2020
Note: Avoided emissions credits prevent hypothetical polluting
activity
Scientists warn that “net zero” and “carbon neutral” are technical
terms and diluting their meanings in marketing campaigns could have
a disastrous impact on the global effort to account for emissions
and reduce greenhouse gas.
The nuance isn’t lost on Heuberger. The 44-year-old Swiss social
entrepreneur has spent almost half his life working on environmental
conservation projects in developing countries. It’s been an uphill
battle to secure funding for the programs, and Heuberger is grateful
for every dollar companies put into South Pole’s projects. It makes
sense to him that firms want to tout their environmental
contributions, especially to worthy efforts to help improve life for
African villagers.But he says the idea that such contributions can
make up for selling fossil fuels will do more harm than good. They
risk undermining the projects themselves, especially as scrutiny of
carbon offsets increases. “These claims are damaging ourselves as
well,” Heuberger says.
That’s in part why well-regarded registries such as Gold Standard
don’t certify offsets from most REDD+ projects, and many experts
including the Science-Based Targets initiative disapprove of using
offsets based on avoided emissions to make net-zero claims. It’s
possible to claim that some trees are standing today that might have
been lost without brush clearing. But it’s just not possible to
establish that extra carbon was removed from the atmosphere.
![](images/images_08_11_2021/Pic8.jpg)
Posters advertising local REDD+ projects line the office walls of
Tarcisius Mahuni, who runs the local district council.
Photographer: Cynthia Matonhodze/Bloomberg
Total is writing its own tale on the
strength of its first-ever sale of carbon-neutral LNG. It’s the
transformation of an old-school energy behemoth into a clean
supermajor.
The company spent the last decade investing billions to position
itself as one of the world’s top LNG producers and has green-lit new
export projects from Russia to Mozambique that are slated to begin
operations this decade. For the last 60 years, natural gas has been
viewed as a cleaner alternative to coal and crude oil. That’s given
companies like Total confidence in its longevity, even in an era of
unprecedented climate action.
That future is looking more and more uncertain. The price of solar
and wind energy is falling much faster than anyone expected. There’s
growing awareness of the climate dangers from leaky pipelines used
to transport the gas, which can release large amounts of methane,
the super-potent greenhouse gas that’s the main component of LNG.
The latest assessment published this week by UN-backed scientists
calls for reducing methane emissions in the next 10 years if the
world is to meet its climate goals.
The International Energy Agency recently put forward a timeline for
keeping global temperatures from rising more than 1.5° Celsius above
pre-industrial levels. The use of natural gas would have to fall by
more than half its current level, meaning no new gas fields or
export terminals should be built from now on.
As a European company, Total is in an awkward position as the
continent’s politicians advance the world’s most-ambitious package
of climate policies. The goal is cutting emissions 55% from 1990
levels by the end of the decade. Total Chief Executive Officer
Patrick Pouyanne said in July that the company would probably aim to
accelerate efforts to cut all its emissions, in line with the
European Union, if those aggressive climate measures are
implemented. In a sign of this shift, Total recently added
“Energies” to its name to highlight the increasing share of its
business that has nothing to do with fossil fuels.
Even as those changes are underway, Total and its peers in Europe
are working to bolster demand for their core product. Labeling LNG
shipments “carbon neutral” is one way to satisfy customers who are
under pressure from their investors and governments to cut
emissions. At least 16 carbon-neutral shipments have changed hands
since 2019, and there’s a push from buyers and sellers to do more
deals. This is especially true in Asia where two of the world’s top
importers—Japan and China—have set targets to zero out emissions.
Asian Demand
Most shipments since July 2019 have gone to Asia
Source: BloombergNEF
None of the energy companies involved have disclosed the math behind
their carbon-neutral claims, and there’s no requirement that they do
so. While Total says it won’t erase emissions from the LNG shipment
it sold to Cnooc from its carbon accounts, there’s no guarantee that
Cnooc will take the same approach. The Chinese state-owned company
has described the gas shipment as “net-zero carbon emissions” and
has indicated that it will rely on similar deals to meet President
Xi Jinping’s goal of reaching net zero by 2060. The trade was a
“pioneering case in China's natural gas industry to explore
carbon-neutral practices,” Cnooc said in a press release announcing
the LNG delivery from Total.
This sets a troubling precedent, says Arvind Ravikumar, an assistant
professor at Harrisburg University of Science and Technology in
Pennsylvania who studies sustainable development. A
nature-conservation project without clear carbon benefits could be
used to cancel out emissions for both Cnooc and China, the world’s
single biggest polluter.
The credits “help them remove emissions from their annual report on
paper without actually ensuring that the amount of emissions gets
removed from the atmosphere,” Ravikumar says. “It seems like they
have all fallen into the trap of finding the quickest and cheapest
way to appear to do something.”
—With assistance from Karoline Kan and Francois De Beaupuy
![](images/images_08_11_2021/Pic9.jpg)
A resident flees the village of Gouves, on
the island of Evia, Greece, on Sunday, Aug. 8, 2021. Elevated risk
of fires is just one of the effects of climate change being felt all
over the world.
Photographer: Konstantinos Tsakalidis/Bloomberg
Climate Scientists Reach ‘Unequivocal’
Consensus on Human-Made Warming in Landmark Report
The first major assessment from the UN-backed Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change in nearly a decade sees no end to rising
temperatures before 2050.
By Eric Roston and Akshat Rathi
August 9, 2021, 1:00 AM PDT Updated on August 9, 2021, 3:59 AM PDT
An epochal new report from the world’s top climate scientists warns
that the planet will warm by 1.5° Celsius in the next two decades
without drastic moves to eliminate greenhouse gas pollution. The
finding from the United Nations-backed group throws a key goal of
the Paris Agreement into danger as signs of climate change become
apparent across every part of the world.
The latest scientific assessment from the UN’s Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change for the first time speaks with certainty
about the total responsibility of human activity for rising
temperatures. The scientists forecast no end to warming trends until
emissions cease.
“It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere,
ocean and land,” wrote the authors of the IPCC’s sixth global
science assessment since 1990 and the first released in more than
eight years. The crucial warming threshold of 2°C will be “exceeded
during the 21st century,” the IPCC authors concluded, without deep
emissions cuts “in the coming decades.”
Scientists Reach ‘Unequivocal’ Consensus on Climate Change
Scientists Reach ‘Unequivocal’ Consensus on Climate Change
The assessment released on Monday is the work of more than 200
scientists digesting thousands of studies, and an accompanying
summary was approved by delegates from 195 countries. More than any
other forecast or record, this report’s determinations establish a
powerful global consensus—less than three months before the UN’s
COP26 international climate talks.
Among the headline findings: The past decade was most likely hotter
than any period in the last 125,000 years, when sea levels were as
much as 10 meters higher. Combustion and deforestation have also
raised carbon dioxide in the atmosphere higher than it’s been in two
million years, according to the report, and agriculture and fossil
fuels have contributed to methane and nitrous oxide concentration
higher than any point in at least 800,000 years.
The full, 3,949-page assessment was released in conjunction with the
42-page “summary for policymakers.” While the latter went through a
diplomatic approval process in addition to a scientific one, the
former comes directly from scientists. Chapter one of the underlying
report includes strong language admonishing Paris signatories,
calling their pledges so far under the agreement “insufficient to
reduce greenhouse gas emission enough” to keep global warming well
below 2°C.
The document is “a code red for humanity,” said Antonio Guterres,
secretary-general of the United Nations, in prepared remarks tied to
the release. “This report must sound a death knell for coal and
fossil fuels before they destroy our planet.”
Heat Spike
Humanity has heated the climate to at least a 100,000-year high. All
of the warming is caused by human influence.
Source: IPCC AR6 Working Group I report
Note: Diagonally shaded areas show 90%–100% certainty range
Even as the IPCC authors have done away with some of the cautious
uncertainty that marked past assessments, the last few months have
seen a series of rapid-fire climate disasters that underline the new
language. Summertime in the Northern Hemisphere has been marred by
severe flooding across Europe and China, as well as alarming drought
and the early onset of large wildfires in the Western U.S. and
Canada. One of the coldest places on the planet, Siberia, has
experienced severe heat and forest fires. Just this past weekend
brought disturbing footage of people fleeing sprawling wildfires in
Greece.
Nearly all of this can be attributed to human influence. The IPCC
found that the combined effects of human activity have already
increased the global average temperature by about 1.1°C above the
late 19th-century average. The contribution to global warming of
natural factors, such as the sun and volcanoes, is estimated to be
close to zero. In fact, humans have dumped enough greenhouse gas
into the atmosphere to heat the planet by 1.5°C, according to the
report, but fine-particle pollution from fossil fuels provides a
cooling effect that masks some of the impact.
Read More:
• There’s Already Enough Greenhouse Gas in the Air to Heat the
Planet by 1.5°C
• Major New Climate Report Puts Pressure on COP26 to ‘Consign Coal
to History’
• Five Key Takeaways From the Latest IPCC Report on Climate Change
• Stop Warming? First, Focus on the Rules: Opinion Digest
• Inside the Showdown Between UN Climate Science and Global Politics
• This Is Why Even Scientists Underestimate Climate Change
In its fifth assessment, published in 2013, IPCC’s volunteer
scientists introduced the idea of a “carbon budget,” setting an
upper bound on the amount of carbon dioxide that can be added to the
atmosphere before it will breach certain temperature thresholds.
“Now we have much more confidence in those numbers,” said Joeri
Rogelj, a lecturer in climate change and the environment at Imperial
College London and one of the report’s authors.
Humanity will have about a 50% chance of staying below the 1.5°C
threshold called for by the Paris Agreement if CO₂ emissions from
2020 onwards remain below 500 billion tons. At the current rate of
emissions, that carbon budget would be used up in about 13 years. If
the rate doesn’t come down, the planet will warm more than 1.5°C.
“Our opportunity to avoid even more catastrophic impacts has an
expiration date,” said Helen Mountford, vice president of climate
and economics at the World Resources Institute. “The report implies
that this decade is truly our last chance to take the actions
necessary to limit temperature rise to 1.5°C. If we collectively
fail to rapidly curb greenhouse gas emissions in the 2020s, that
goal will slip out of reach.”
Hitting the Limit
No single number captures the remaining CO2 budget. Estimates assume
different warming levels and odds of meeting them
Source: IPCC AR6 Working Group I report
Note: The higher and lower numbers in each budget scenario represent
17% and 83% chances of staying under each temperature limit. The
world emitted 34 Gt of CO2 in 2020
The new publication lands in the middle of the ramp-up to COP26, to
be held in Glasgow in November. A global deal to pursue faster
emission cuts would depend on poor countries securing $100 billion a
year in climate finance from rich countries, something envisioned in
previous climate agreements but not yet achieved. National
governments would also need to agree to rules governing the trading
of emissions permits, to ensure those moving faster towards cuts are
rewarded for doing so.
Unlike the IPCC’s somewhat anomalous 2018 special report, Global
Warming of 1.5°C, the publication released Monday doesn’t explicitly
state that net-zero emissions must be achieved by 2050 to meet the
goals set out in the Paris Agreement. That’s because this group’s
mandate was to assess new scientific knowledge, not prescribe policy
actions. Upcoming IPCC assessments expected next year in February
and March will address climate impacts, adaptation and mitigation.
The authors of the new IPCC publication add that, after accounting
for global emissions since the 2018 special release, its estimate of
the world’s remaining carbon budget is “of similar magnitude” to the
one in its prior publication, implying that the finding stands. This
latest assessment’s most ambitious scenario shows emissions falling
to net zero around 2050, which is as close as it comes to restating
the top-line conclusion of the special report.
All five of the new report’s temperature scenarios show the 1.5°C
marker passed by 2040, before cooling down below that mark in only
one of five scenarios. Achieving that cooling will depend on
large-scale removal of carbon dioxide from the air. An independent
analysis conducted by the group Climate Action Tracker suggests that
current global policies may track either the IPCC’s medium or high
scenarios, which lead to 2.7°C and 3.6°C of warming by 2100.
New Scientific Tools Enter the Mainstream
The climate science profession has seen entire specialties
emerge and mature in the years since the IPCC’s previous mega-report
on science. None of these is more resonant than the ability to
analyze extreme weather events in real-time to determine the role of
climate change.
Twenty years ago, researchers couldn’t link a specific weather event
directly to human-made climate change, meaning that the scientific
likelihood of a specific storm or heat wave being tied to warmer
temperatures wasn’t knowable. Today, many of these weather
attribution studies can be produced within days or weeks of an
event.
The deadly heat wave that gripped the western coast of North America
in June had detectable evidence of human responsibility. World
Weather Attribution, an international research group, needed just
days after the heat broke to conclude that the extraordinary
temperatures would be “virtually impossible” without climate change.
This ability of scientists to parse the probability that any one
disaster is driven by warming temperatures highlights one of the
IPCC’s core findings: The entire globe is warming, although not
uniformly. Regions will still experience natural swings in
temperature, particularly in coming years, as it takes time for
heating to have a significant effect on the Earth’s processes.
A World of Change
The entire globe is undergoing changes, some unprecedented in
thousands or hundreds of thousands years
Source: IPCC AR6 Working Group I report
Another research breakthrough in the field of climate sensitivity
now allows scientists to make even more confident projections about
future warming. Drawing from research on ancient climates, as well
as advanced satellite technology that monitors clouds and emissions,
IPCC authors were able to narrow their temperature projections for
the rest of the century, giving humanity a clearer picture of what
lies in store if we don’t act quickly to curtail emissions.
The Earth’s response to a theoretical doubling of preindustrial CO₂
levels is now thought to be between 2.5°C to 4°C—a much smaller
range than 1.5°C to 4.5°C in previous IPCC reports. “The top end is
being reduced, which means that some of these really bad outcomes,
where we roll sixes on the climate sensitivity dice, seems a little
less plausible than they did,” said Zeke Hausfather, director of
climate and energy at the Breakthrough Institute, who wasn’t an
author of the summary.
This development helped the IPCC authors cope with another headache:
Some Earth-system models updated for this assessment began showing
surprisingly high projections for future warming. But the
breakthrough allowing greater confidence in the Earth’s potential
response to CO₂ gave scientists welcome evidence to balance the
modeling approach with other research.
![](images/images_08_11_2021/Pic10.jpg)
Methane escaping from melting permafrost
can have a much greater warming effect than CO₂.
Photographer: Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post/Getty
Images
The improvements in projections came, in
part, from a stronger grasp of so-called “climate feedbacks” such as
the way melting ice and greenhouse gases escaping from thawing
permafrost compound on each other in previously unpredictable ways.
Scientists are now more confident that lowering emissions will mean
less chance of activating feedbacks. That also means that the
actions humanity takes in the near term to limit emissions will be a
determining factor in whether we see these dramatically accelerating
effects in the longer term.
The IPCC’s new findings rule out the
possibility that unrestricted emissions will have only a mild effect
on global temperatures, a hope few if any observers were still
clinging to. But the updated science, particularly the narrowed
range for climate sensitivity, provides powerful evidence of the
world’s best pathway to safety: swiftly ending the release of carbon
dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
What Comes Next?
There is an endgame, if nations choose to try and reach it. The data
continue to show a straightforward relationship between CO₂ and
temperature. That means that when atmospheric carbon concentrations
stop rising, the temperature will, too, soon thereafter.
Scientists have broken ground by projecting what happens when our
emissions cease. As the world reduces its use of fossil fuels, for
instance, the cooling effect of aerosols will start to decline.
Scientists are confident that one way to counter that decline would
be to pursue “strong, rapid and sustained reductions” in methane
emissions. Beyond CO₂, methane, and nitrous oxide, there are four
other greenhouse gases that also provide opportunities to slow
warming.
![](images/images_08_11_2021/Pic11.jpg)
Greenville, California, an Indian Valley
settlement of a few hundred people dating back to the mid-1800s Gold
Rush, was decimated by the Dixie fire last week.
Photographer: Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images
Even at 1.1°C, climate change is taking
lives and destroying property and forcing retreat, migration and
conflict. The effects of human activity are continuing to melt
glaciers and sea ice. Heating oceans means raising them—at a rate
more than 2.5 times faster in this century than the last, according
to the IPCC. Some of that harm is now baked in for centuries to
come.
“This last year has proven that climate change is no longer a
distant threat,” said Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist at the
Nature Conservancy, who wasn’t involved in the summary. “We can no
longer assume that citizens of more affluent and secure countries
like Canada, Germany, Japan and the United States will be able to
ride-out the worst excesses of a rapidly destabilizing climate, even
as those in more vulnerable latitudes suffer.”
A Path to Safety
An emissions scenario that can keep global warming below 1.5°C
reaches zero emissions around 2050.
Source: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
In a press conference Monday morning, IPCC leadership emphasized
that the disparate effects of climate change are being felt in every
region of the world. The new report also comes with an interactive
tool that enables users to apply its underlying datasets to the
world map. That could, for example, help India reckon with the
impact warming could have on economically crucial rainfall patterns
under different emissions scenarios.
“When we put everything together, for almost all of the 44 regions
in the world, coastal climate impact drivers were increasing,” said
Roshanka Ranasinghe, professor of climate change impacts and coastal
risk at the University of Twente and one of the authors of the
assessment.
The IPCC is inherently conservative. It emphasizes information in
which scientists have the most evidence and agreement. At the same
time, the new scientific consensus doesn’t rule out continued
investigation of its lower-confidence findings. The authors indicate
that some potentially sweeping changes are not as well understood,
such as unlikely but still possible heat extremes or ice-sheet
collapse.
Another “low-likelihood high-impact outcome” flagged by IPCC authors
is a sudden, dramatic change in ocean circulation. A study released
last week in the journal Nature Climate Change documented changes in
the powerful churn of Atlantic water as potential indicators of “an
almost complete loss of stability.”
The IPCC itself foresees further weakening of the Atlantic
Meridional Overturning Circulation in the decades ahead, with
disagreement over the possibility of collapse before 2100. Such an
event would weaken monsoons in Africa and Asia, strengthen them in
the Southern Hemisphere and dry out Europe.
There are always more questions to ask, and the perpetual churn of
research means even the most comprehensive assessment can never be
truly complete. “That’s just what science is, right?” said Tamsin
Edwards, an IPCC author and a reader in climate change at King’s
College London. “It’s constantly evolving and refining and adding
new studies, and improving our knowledge. The intensity of the
effort that goes into assessing the literature—the 14,000 papers for
this report—makes it an authoritative, comprehensive, coherent
synthesis in a way that a single paper can never be.”
— With assistance from Dave Merrill and Mira Rojanasakul
(Adds a new sixth paragraph to incorporate material from the IPCC’s
full report. Also adds a new 30th paragraph on the group’s
interactive mapping tool and quote from Roshanka Ranasinghe.)
(Adds a new sixth paragraph to incorporate material from the IPCC’s
full report. Also adds a new 30th paragraph on the group’s
interactive mapping tool and quote from Roshanka Ranasinghe.)
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