WHAT LIES BENEATH: THE SCIENTIFIC UNDERSTATEMENT OF CLIMATE RISKS (original) (raw)
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What Lies Beneath: The understatement of existential climate risk
Human-induced climate change is an existential risk to human civilisation: an adverse outcome that will either annihilate intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential, unless carbon emissions are rapidly reduced. Special precautions that go well beyond conventional risk management practice are required if the increased likelihood of very large climate impacts — known as “fat tails” — are to be adequately dealt with. The potential consequences of these lower-probability, but higher-impact, events would be devastating for human societies. The bulk of climate research has tended to underplay these risks, and exhibited a preference for conservative projections and scholarly reticence, although increasing numbers of scientists have spoken out in recent years on the dangers of such an approach. Climate policymaking and the public narrative are significantly informed by the important work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). However, IPCC reports also tend toward reticence and caution, erring on the side of “least drama”, and downplaying the more extreme and more damaging outcomes. Whilst this has been understandable historically, given the pressure exerted upon the IPCC by political and vested interests, it is now becoming dangerously misleading with the acceleration of climate impacts globally. What were lower-probability, higher-impact events are now becoming more likely. This is a particular concern with potential climatic tipping points — passing critical thresholds which result in step changes in the climate system — such as the polar ice sheets (and hence sea levels), and permafrost and other carbon stores, where the impacts of global warming are non-linear and difficult to model with current scientific knowledge. However the extreme risks to humanity which the tipping points represent, justify strong precautionary management. Under-reporting on these issues is irresponsible, contributing to the failure of imagination that is occurring today in our understanding of, and response to, climate change. If climate policymaking is to be soundly based, a reframing of scientific research within an existential risk-management framework is now urgently required. This must be taken up not just in the work of the IPCC, but also in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations if we are to address the real climate challenge. Current processes will not deliver either the speed or the scale of change required.
The difficult, the dangerous, and the catastrophic: Managing the spectrum of climate risks
Earth's Future, 2014
The notion of a threshold of dangerous climate change has been central to national and international efforts to address climate risks. However, the focus on a single target has now become an obstacle because it reinforces three key problems: it frames climate change as a distant abstract threat, it impedes integration of mitigation and adaptation, and it fails to recognize the diversity of values and risk perceptions of people around the globe. We present an alternative framework that considers both biophysical science and social values in characterizing the broad spectrum of climate risks. The framework also presents the options for managing these risks within four quadrants defined by the inherent limits to mitigation and adaptation. This quadrant-based approach to managing the spectrum of climate risks restructures the climate change problem from avoiding a distant catastrophe to minimizing collective suffering.
Understanding Climate Change as Risk: A review of IPCC guidance for decision-making
Journal of Risk Research, 2019
This paper examines the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) recommendation for risk-based approaches to knowing and communicating policy problems, and its suitability as a general directive for public policy decision-makers and their advisors. Although explicitly ambiguous about what a risk-based approach is or should be, this paper shows how the IPCC's 5 th Assessment Report nonetheless perpetuates ideals of objective risk calculation for rational policymaking. Policy evidence can benefit from context-appropriate problem-framings, as the IPCC concedes. Risk is one of a number of useful conceptual frames for understanding climate policy problems. This paper contributes to climate-related policymaking by describing how IPCC decision-scientists can enhance their guidance to account for the politics of policymaking. It cautions against continuing assumptions or prescriptions for the rational application of objective risk assessment to policymaking, and discusses some of the challenges faced to date by the risk-based approach when it has been applied to policymaking. The paper then briefly examines how we might better situate understandings of risk within alternative conceptual frames to advance climate change policy.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2009
These judgments were vetted by 3 rounds of IPCC review and were approved in the Summary for Policymakers of both the AR4 Working Group 2 and Synthesis Reports by the IPCC Plenary. † Vulnerability to climate change is the degree to which geophysical, biological and socioeconomic systems are susceptible to and unable to cope with adverse impacts of climate change. ‡ The criteria are: (i) magnitude of impacts; (ii) timing of impacts; (iii) persistence and reversibility of impacts; (iv) potential for adaptation; (v) distributional aspects of impacts and vulnerabilities; (vi) likelihood (estimates of uncertainty) of impacts and vulnerabilities and confidence in those estimates; and (vii) importance of the system(s) at risk. IPCC authors applied only the first 6 criteria in its assessment, because ''importance'' is really a subjective judgment by a potential decision-maker and thus crosses too far into the realm of being ''policy prescriptive''; we follow the same convention.
Climate change risk – what is it and how should it be expressed?
Journal of Risk Research, 2019
This paper provides new knowledge on how to understand and describe climate change risk. This type of risk is of the utmost importance for us all, but current approaches for conceptualizing and characterizing it, as for example used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), suffer from severe weaknesses, resulting in poor communication and misguidance. Two main problems are that the risk concept is too strongly associated with statistically expected values, and that the risk characterizations fail to integrate probabilities and judgments of the strength of the knowledge supporting these. The present paper points to and discusses these weaknesses. It shows how a solid risk science foundation can be formed, which clarifies the meaning of key climate change risk concepts and supports and improves the evidence-informed communication and decision-making. Specifically, the paper provides insights on the nexus between climate change risk, uncertainties and knowledge, including the potential for surprises, as well as the links between risk and vulnerability (resilience). Recommendations are provided on how to assess uncertainties in relation to risk, using precise and imprecise probabilities, combining these with strength of knowledge judgement, and establishing scientific processes to scrutinize the underlying knowledges basis with respect to potential surprises.
Environmental Research Letters, 2009
Key message 1: climatic trends Recent observations confirm that, given high rates of observed emissions, the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realized. For many key parameters, the climate system is already moving beyond the patterns of natural variability within which our society and economy has developed and thrived. These parameters include global mean surface temperature, sea-level rise, ocean and ice sheet dynamics, ocean acidification, and extreme climatic events. There is a significant risk that many of the trends will accelerate, leading to an increasing risk of abrupt or irreversible climatic shifts.