A story of the Agence France Presse said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is expected to highlight—through heart stopping images of fires and floods dominating news cycles of the world—for leaders of governments still dithering in the face of mounting evidence that climate change is an existential crisis.
In the past two weeks, I have come across articles from mainstream media abroad tackling extreme weather, bushfires, flooding and earthquakes and the swath of destruction they leave along with the fast progression of zoonotic and other diseases that are adversely affecting humans overtaking their ingenuity at handling public health issues.
I surmise that these unwanted episodes are happening for a purpose— to make it clear to environmental leaders of all nations who are meeting in November in Glasgow, UK for the 26th UN Conference of Parties on climate change—that they should make good on their commitments to reverse global warming and destroying/polluting the natural resources endowed us by the Creator.
UN Climate Report
A story of the Agence France Presse said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is expected to highlight—through heart stopping images of fires and floods dominating news cycles of the world—for leaders of governments still dithering in the face of mounting evidence that climate change is an existential crisis.
The UN's climate science panel will unveil its much-anticipated projections for temperature and sea-level rises less than three months before a crucial climate summit in Scotland where 195 nations approved the IPCC’s comprehensive assessment of past and future warming in the form of a ‘summary for policymakers,” the AFP reported.
On the heels of deadly floods in India, China and northern Europe as well as asphalt-melting heatwaves in North America and southern Europe, the IPCC's report is the first so-called assessment report since 2014.
Both the world and the science have changed a lot since then.
With increasingly sophisticated technology allowing scientists to measure climate change and predict its future path, the report will project global temperature changes until the end of the century under different emissions scenarios.
It is also expected to reflect huge progress in so-called attribution science, which allows experts to link individual extreme weather events directly to man-made climate change.
While the underlying IPCC report is purely scientific, the summary for policymakers is negotiated by national representatives, and therefore subject to competing priorities.
Belgian climate physicist and former IPCC co-chair Jean-Pascal Ypersele, who was party to the negotiations, said the talks were guided by the underlying science.
The report comes less than three months before the COP26 climate talks in Glasgow, which are seen as vital for humanity's chance of limiting the worst impacts of global warming.
"This is going to be the starkest warning yet, that human behavior is alarmingly accelerating global warming and this is why COP26 has to be the moment we get this right," COP26 President Alok Sharma said over the weekend.
"We can't afford to wait two years, five years, 10 years -– this is the moment," he told a British newspaper.
French climatologist Corinne Le Quere congratulated the delegates on Friday for finalizing "the text of what I think will be one of the most important scientific reports ever published."
BBC on why China’s climate policy matters
On August 9, BBC said that China’s carbon emissions are vast and growing, dwarfing those of other countries. Without reductions in China’s emissions, the world cannot win the fight against climate change.
China's President Xi Jinping has said his country will aim for its emissions to reach their highest point before 2030 and for carbon neutrality to be achieved by 2060. But Xi did not say how this ambitious goal will be achieved considering it has the biggest per-person emissions, half of those of the US, but its 1.4 billion population and explosive economic growth have pushed it way ahead of any other country in its overall emissions, the BBC reported.
China became the world's largest emitter of carbon dioxide in 2006 and is now responsible for more than a quarter of the world's overall greenhouse gas emissions.
For China to reduce its emissions, experts said this would mean a radical shift from coal (its main source of energy for decades) to other cleaner fuels. Xi says China will phase down coal use from 2026 but this announcement was criticized by some governments for not going far enough.
Researchers at Tsinghua University in Beijing say China will need to stop using coal entirely for generating electricity by 2050, to be replaced by nuclear and renewable energy production.
But far from shutting down coal-fired power stations, China is currently building new ones at more than 60 locations across the country, with many sites having more than one plant.
New stations are usually active for 30 to 40 years, so China will need to reduce the capacity of newer plants and close old ones to bring emissions down, says researcher Philippe Ciais of the Institute of Environment and Climate Science in Paris.
It may be possible to retrofit some to capture emissions, but the technology to do so at scale is still developing, and many plants will have to be written off after minimal use.
China argues it has a right to do what Western countries have done in the past, releasing carbon dioxide in the process of developing its economy and reducing poverty.
It has also financed coal-fired power stations outside China through its Belt and Road initiative though it does now appear to be scaling back new investments.
Switch to green energy
Tsinghua University researchers say 90 percent of power should come from nuclear and renewables by 2050.
In moving towards that goal, China's lead in the manufacture of green technology, such as solar panels and large-scale batteries, may be a big help.
China first embraced green technologies to tackle air pollution, a serious problem for many cities.
But the government also believes they have enormous economic potential, providing jobs and income for millions of Chinese, and reducing China's dependence on foreign oil and gas.
"China is already leading the global energy transition," says Yue Cao of the Overseas Development Institute. "One of the reasons we are able to deploy cheaper and cheaper green technology is China."
China generates more solar power than any other country. That might not be so impressive given China's enormous population, but it is a sign of where the country is heading.
China's wind power installations were more than triple those of any other country in 2020.
China says the proportion of its energy generated from non-fossil fuel sources should be 25 percent by 2030, and it is expected by many observers to hit the target early.
Electric drive
China ranks seventh in the world for its percentage of car sales that are electric, but given its huge size, China makes and buys more electric cars than any other country by a considerable margin. About one in 20 cars bought in China is electric-powered.
Working out by how much the shift to electric vehicles reduces emissions is not straightforward - particularly when considering manufacturing and charging sources.
But studies suggest that emissions over the lifetimes of electric vehicles are typically below those of petrol and diesel equivalents.
This matters because transport is responsible for around a quarter of carbon emissions from fuel combustion, with road vehicles being the largest emitters.
China will also by 2025 be producing batteries with double the capacity of those produced by the rest of the world combined.
Observers say that will enable the storage and release of energy from renewable sources on a previously impossible scale.
China is greening its lands
Getting to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions doesn't mean that China will stop producing emissions.
It means China will cut emissions as much as possible and absorb what's left, through a combination of different approaches.
Increasing the area of land covered in vegetation will help, as plants absorb carbon dioxide.
Here again, there is encouraging news. China is getting greener at a faster rate than any other country, largely as a result of its forestry programs designed to reduce soil erosion and pollution.
It is also partly a result of replanting fields to produce more than one harvest per year, which keeps land covered in vegetation for longer.
So what next?
The world needs China to succeed.
"Unless China decarbonizes, we're not going to beat climate change," says prof David Tyfield of the Lancaster Environment Centre.
China has some big advantages, particularly its capacity to stick to long-term strategies and mobilize large-scale investments.
The Chinese authorities are facing a colossal task. What happens next could hardly be more important.
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