Climate Emergency Summit – David Spratt’s Science Update

David Spratt has been on the case for some time now, and he knows the science cold. So it’s well worth your time to read this brief “state of the science” summary he wrote for the amazing Australian Climate Emergency Summit that just took placein Melbourne. Do note one of the key takeaways, emphasized in the graphic here — we will hit 1.5C around 2030.

While we’re on the subject, here’s the conference declaration. It’s very much in the “emergency mobilization demands bipartisan action” camp, which doesn’t strike me as particularly realistic these days, but what do I know? I haven’t been to Australia since the fires. No way I can make meaningful short-term political judgements.

So I’m definitely not going to argue with comms expert Peter Lewis, who recently offered this in the Guardian:

“The idea of pushing for centrist, reasonable and sensible policies may chafe when the world is on the brink. It does not dispel the need to campaign hard at the margins – climate rebellions and school strikes are essential to shifting the window to make other policy change possible. But the risk is to confuse the movement with the moment. If political change is the answer and Australia can’t wait until 2022, then locating the Overton window and finding a way through it now seems the only viable way forward.”

The Overton climate window sure is open now! New polling indicates that 64% of Australians support “Setting a zero-carbon pollution target for 2030”.

Equity in the Global Stocktake

Actually, the title of this report is Equity in the Global Stocktake and Independent Global Stocktake, the iGST being a loose but interesting collaborative of climate research institutes. We at the Climate Equity Reference Project are active in iGST equity debates, and wrote its initial scoping paper on the equity challenge.

Here’s the “blurb,” such as it is:

“In this paper, we’re looking at the scope of assessments in stocktaking as an issue of equity; some “quality” criteria for equity benchmarks and equity information in stocktaking; how the whole issue of climate finance and support could be dealt with from an equity point of view, what could be said about intranational equity; and what minimal (and other) standards of procedural equity should be guaranteed. “

This paper is fairly technical, but very much of interest, for the simple reason that equity is essential to any future climate regime in which anything like an “Ambition Mechanism” is actually functioning. Which is to say that the Paris Agreement’s much discussed ambition mechanism is still a dream.