Another trendy new thing in climate, and by new we mean old, is “overshoot”. As in Bloomberg Green saying “Fixing Climate Overshoot Means Deep, Immediate Emissions Curbs, UN Warns.” Yes the solution to the unwillingness of the world to enact deep, immediate emission curbs is to call for deep, immediate emission curbs. Climate Home News seeks vainly to kindle excitement with “This is the first COP to be staring an almost certain overshoot of the 1.5C warming limit in the face, even as countries squabble over when the next UN science reports should be delivered.” And Newsweek declares, seconded by MSN, that “Climate overshoot needs a new generation of researchers”. To which one is tempted to respond “How will a new generation of activist researchers, parroting the same lines as the old one, change anything?” And then to add “If we need a whole new generation, are you saying the previous generation were and are rubbish?” If so we heartily agree with respect to people like Michael Mann, as well as to many in the field who know alarmist claims are vastly overheated but remain silent to protect their comfy careers. And also that it’s an unusual brazen passing of the hat. Especially since what this new generation of researchers will not look into, if they know what’s good for their government grants, is that the 1.5C limit was a political polemical device with no scientific basis whatsoever.
The Bloomberg Green piece seems to think there’s nothing left to discuss except political will anyway:
“Countries will have to cut CO2 emissions by nearly a fifth by the end of the decade compared to 2025 levels to achieve the ‘lowest possible’ overshoot, the UN Environment Programme said in its annual emissions gap report, published on Wednesday. The UNEP defined that scenario as limiting temperatures to 1.7C to 1.8C above pre-industrial levels and returning global mean warming to 1.5C by the end of the century. It described the necessary emissions reductions as “immediate, deep, rapid and sustained.”
So there you have it. We know what we have to do and why:
“Each fraction of a degree of warming above pre-industrial levels raises the risk of extreme weather events, harm to global food production and rapid inflation.”
Which is arrant rubbish and innumerately so, because 1/1000 is a fraction. If they mean “every fraction at least as big as 1/10” they’d just be wrong. Here they’re ridiculous.
But fools rush in, so they even say we know how to do it:
“The report sets out potential paths forward after the UN first reported last month that exceeding the 1.5C threshold envisaged by the Paris Agreement in 2015 is now virtually guaranteed.”
Actually they know how not to, they just don’t know what they know:
“Global leaders and climate negotiators are set to meet for COP31 in the Turkish city of Antalya in early November to discuss how to combat warming and adapt to its impacts.”
And the last 30 have been such brilliant displays of intelligent discussion, cooperative reasoning and decisive action plans that they’re holding another… and another… and another… And for good measure, they quote someone with a proven track record of irresponsible hysteria to say one more untrue thing:
“Overshoot is not surrender. We can still keep it as small and as short as possible and bring temperatures back below 1.5C before the end of the century.”
Alas “we” cannot turn down the global thermostat even if at COP31 we all agreed to make sacrifices instead of quarreling over how big a sacrifice some other fool should make. But if anything in that Bloomberg Green were true, what would be left to research?
Well, um, it’s not very clear. According to Gary Yohe, the professor who wrote the Newsweek item:
“The possibility of cooling the planet after exceeding a climate target may sound reassuring. But for families deciding where to live, communities protecting their water supplies, and governments planning infrastructure, a lower future temperature would not necessarily mean that earlier damage will disappear. I believe preparing a new generation of researchers to understand that distinction should become a front-of-mind climate policy priority.”
Apparently he wants to make sure that a new generation of researchers are all indoctrinated into even more extreme alarmist assumptions than even the current generation holds. Why? What will they do that this generation won’t?
Achieve omniscience, apparently:
“My concern is that the promise of an eventual return could encourage an incomplete understanding of recovery. A temperature target can help guide policy, but it cannot tell us everything about the condition of a coastline, the security of a food supply, or a community’s ability to return to current conditions.”
Again, the idea that in climate science optimism about brushing aside global warming is about to run rampant seems odd. But nothing, repeat nothing, can tell us “everything about the condition of a coastline”. Besides apparently we already know everything anyway:
“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) finds that overshoot brings additional risks, some involving many irreversible impacts and associated consequences, which will have increased in magnitude and duration.”
It gets a bit interdisciplinary:
“That is why I see overshoot as a challenge spanning science, economics, and public policy. Physical scientists can investigate environmental changes. Economists can examine costs and the value of competing uses of limited resources. Social scientists can explore how institutions and communities might respond. Bringing those perspectives together could make the resulting advice more useful to people facing difficult decisions.”
But physical scientists, economists and social scientists have been droning on about all this stuff for decades already. As Yohe concedes:
“Researchers entering these fields would not be starting from nothing. Climate assessments have already examined the risks of warming temperatures up to the current 1.5 degrees Celsius above the 1850-1900 average, and decades of work offer methods, observations, and experience on which to build.”
Still, send more money:
“I would like universities and research funders to provide sustained opportunities for early-career scientists, economists, and policy researchers to work together on this new set of questions.”
Which are not new questions, and do not require a new generation of researchers. Unless you mean one that doesn’t automatically accept and parrot the stale dogmas of the past three decades. That suggestion we could actually go for.
