NEWS BRIEFING and EXPERT REACTION: IPCC landmark climate science report - Aussie authors speak

Statement on behalf of ERICA (Energy Research Institute’s Council for Australia) 

1. We have all the technologies required to decarbonise the electricity sector and the passenger vehicle transport sector and this would be cheaper than maintaining a reliable electricity sector using existing fossil fuel technologies.
2. The Australian Energy Research community is standing by to support the commonwealth and state governments to advise on best pathways to net zero as fast as possible and at an affordable, cost.
3. The Australian research community is participating in the development of a national  Energy Transition Research Plan to ensure Australian Industry and Government are able to implement current plans, such as AEMO's excellent Integrated System Plan (ISP) towards a 100 per cent renewable electricity grid. As the CEO of AEMO said recently, we need to be ready for a grid that can support instantaneous 100 per cent renewables fraction by 2025 and the knowledge does not yet exist for that. This means both technical solutions such as AI for grid integration, consumer participation and market design for the next version of the national electricity market (NEM). This is what the ERICA research community is standing by to support.
4. What is therefore needed is a clear and coordinated government energy-climate change mitigation policy such as an economy-wide carbon trading scheme to send the economic signals to industry and the community.

The evidence is overwhelming: human activities, particularly the burning of fossil fuels and the destruction of forests, are rapidly changing Earth’s climate in every region and across every climate system.

This is the main thrust of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Working Group 1 report (The Physical Science Basis) prepared by over 200 scientists.

The report also reveals how, as the driest inhabited continent, Australia is highly vulnerable to the impacts of global warming. Recent events, including the scale and intensity of the summer bushfires of 2019–20, and the severe coral bleaching impacting the Great Barrier Reef that occurred in three of five years from 2016, demonstrate just two of the consequences of a warming planet for Australia’s people, economy, and environment.

All countries have to act. Some have, some haven’t. It is in Australia’s national interest for us all to act quickly. We have much to lose if we don’t, and much to gain if we do. The evidence tells us we must move beyond our current commitments and do more. Only through collective real, rapid and large-scale greenhouse gas emission reductions can we lessen the scale of the impacts of global warming.

Whilst the IPCC report is sobering and the Code Red warning is real, the situation is neither hopeless nor insurmountable. But it is urgent. As with the COVID-19 pandemic, science has solutions. As the IPCC report concluded “Every tonne of CO2 emissions adds to global warming”, we can limit future warming by limiting Australian and global emissions of carbon dioxide from human activity today. Every nations’ actions count.

The Australian Academy of Science in March this year released a report on the risks to Australia of a three degrees warmer world. The Academy’s report shows Australia can become a clean energy exporter and potentially a global renewable energy superpower. It highlights Australia’s relative advantage with its abundant natural resources for solar and other renewable energy generation, as well as significant deposits of new economy minerals critical for developing batteries and other low emission technologies.

Today, Australia must again harvest our investment in science and technology, as we did urgently to fight COVID-19. We have enormous resources for the next wave of innovative technologies. We can and must grasp the exciting economic opportunities presented by the new economy. As a smart and agile nation with a skilled workforce, we can immediately scale up existing technology, and lean on our industrial base and plentiful renewable energy resources to enable greater emission reductions.

I often hear that the challenge of climate change is too hard, too big, too overwhelming, and not immediate, thereby not demanding the same urgency the pandemic has required. These excuses fail to recognise how far we have come, the available technologies, the urgency so clearly manifest in this IPCC Report, the willingness of the voting public to do their bit and their growing expectation that all our leaders do theirs.

This report is an enormous, mostly voluntary undertaking by scientists around the world to assess and communicate the science of climate change. I am very grateful for their hard work and late nights to get this finalised under the trying conditions of the pandemic.

This latest report doesn't hold any surprises, it deepens our understanding in many aspects and makes the message clearer than ever. We can avoid dangerous climate change by reducing emissions immediately and substantially, continued increases in heatwaves and many other extremes will occur if we don't. Every action that we can take now counts towards reducing the risks from climate change.

The more we know about climate change, the more we should be concerned. This report is another clear and loud alarm bell.

It makes clear the impacts of climate change are accumulating almost every day; we’re already seeing worsening temperature extremes such as marine heatwaves that cause coral bleaching and heatwaves on land with dangerous consequences for human health.

If we don’t start to reduce our emissions significantly before 2050, the world is extremely likely to exceed 2°C of warming during the 21st century.

Reducing emissions from the 2020s onwards and reaching net-zero before the 2050s is really our best chance at keeping temperature increases below 1.5°C.

Impending sea level rise will create compound events with other climate factors. For example, although the Pacific is projected to generally face fewer cyclones under future warming, they are likely to become more intense. This, coupled with sea-level rise, will worsen already deadly storm surge events in countries like Fiji and Vanuatu.

And despite a projected increase in rainfall with future climate change in the equatorial Pacific, many locations will likely face greater water scarcity due to saltwater intrusion from rising seas and higher rates of potential evaporation due to increased temperatures.

Fortunately, there are many emerging opportunities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This includes transitioning to 100 per cent renewable energy as rapidly as possible, decarbonising transport, reducing emissions from agriculture, and drawing down and storing atmospheric greenhouse gas emissions.

The latest IPCC report underlines that climate change is happening now, and will continue to get worse if drastic cuts to emissions are not undertaken.

Climate change is unequivocal, and humans are responsible for the vast majority of this change. Compared to previous IPCC reports, the language around these statements of current and future change has only become stronger and more confident, reflecting the status of the science undertaken in recent times.

It is imperative to remember that climate change is happening NOW. The world has warmed by almost 1.1°C, and Australia by 1.4°C. With this change, we have seen increases in the frequency and severity of heatwaves, more severe bushfires, more intense rainfall events, and more droughts over some regions. Compound extreme events, which occur at the same time, have also increased.

Many of these changes scale with global warming – the more global warming we experience, the worse these extremes will be. Given recent extreme events, for example, the 2019/2020 Black Summer and the devastating 49.6°C temperatures and following wildfires in Canada, have occurred at only 1°C warming, extreme events that occur of 5°C, or even 3°C, will be far more crippling.

This report stresses the absolute urgency to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as much as possible as soon as possible.

Unfortunately, it is unlikely that we will limit global warming to 1.5°C or 2°C, given the short time we need to turn our emissions around, as well as relying on underdeveloped technology to extract emissions from our atmosphere and store them safely in the ground.

But that does not mean we should give up. We MUST do as much as possible as soon as possible. If we take credible and serious action over the next few decades, we have a solid chance of avoiding 5°C warming. So, let’s just get on with it." 

This new report represents a huge effort. It not only expresses greater confidence in the future warming and its consequences that we could face, but drills down to much more regionally specific information which is needed as we move from debating climate change to planning for it.

I hope that the increased confidence, together with the events we are seeing around the world, such as huge fires and searing heat, will give our leaders the confidence to start taking the stronger steps that are needed to reduce carbon emissions at the COP26 meeting later this year.

The latest IPCC report is definitive in its assessment that climate change is here, it is caused by humans and it will get worse. Every bit of further warming is going to hurt, increasing our risks from heavy rainfall, prolonged droughts, deadly heat, dangerous fire weather and rising oceans.

The sixth IPCC Assessment Report provides a comprehensive review of the state of Earth's climate and the possible futures that lie ahead. There is increased confidence around many key statements, but the central message remains the same as before: Our use of fossil fuels has caused the climate to warm and if we don't drastically reduce our greenhouse gas emissions we risk a much warmer world and worse climate change impacts.
 
This report includes an increased focus on climate extremes as the science around climate change and high-impact events has grown. For example, the burgeoning area of event attribution, in which the role of human-caused climate change on extreme events may be examined, is used to show that some recent hot extremes would have been extremely unlikely to occur without human influences on the climate.

There is also an emphasis on projected climate changes at different levels of global warming, as the Paris Agreement has brought about explicit goals of limiting global warming to well below 2°C and preferably below 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. A large body of work shows that going beyond these levels of global warming will have disastrous consequences, particularly in the developing world.
 
The IPCC report synthesises a vast amount of work and will inform governments around the world in the lead up to COP26 on the choices they make and the resulting impacts on Earth's climate.

The IPCC report emphasises the increasing risks of global temperatures exceeding the 1.5°C Paris target, and even the more dangerous 2°C. In fact, the current emission reductions policies in place around the world are projected to result in warming well above the upper threshold.

Despite considering the unconditional pledges and targets from governments made so far, warming is still expected to go well above the 2°C threshold. 

Fortunately, the IPCC shows that a pathway exists to maintain warming close to 1.5°C providing there are rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. In May, the International Energy Agency's first comprehensive energy roadmap stated that the 'pathway is narrow and requires an unprecedented transformation of how energy is produced, transported and used globally'. Crucially they state that no new oil and natural gas fields are needed in this pathway. 

Clearly, there is no more time for further delays or obstruction and urgent action is needed to avoid the worst impacts from climate change. 

There is no doubt that, just like with COVID-19, this is a race.

The overall message of the IPCC Report is that climate scientists are even more confident that the world is undergoing serious climate change and that it is largely human-caused. Moreover, the only way to prevent this from becoming a cataclysmic disaster is to get back to net-zero emissions of greenhouse gases as soon as possible.

The impacts on various climate indicators such as sea-level rise, loss of glaciers, Arctic sea ice, and extreme weather events are becoming more pronounced. Many of these changes will be irreversible for centuries to come.

The Paris Agreement has developed various policy interventions to mitigate climate change. These include more rigorous carbon pricing. This IPCC Report wants governments to pursue these policies much more vigorously.

If there is an optimistic aspect to the report, it is that there are pathways to climate-resilient sustainable development, but these require urgent, concerted and cooperative mitigation policy action by the major polluting countries.