OMNI CLIMATE MEMO MONDAYS, #140, AUGUST 14, 2023

 

OMNI CLIMATE MEMO MONDAYS, #140, AUGUST 14, 2023

NOTES FROM THE EDITORS.  mONTHLY REVIEW.  June 2022 (Volume 74, Number 2)

by The Editors

(Jun 01, 2022)

Topics: Capitalism  Climate Change  Ecology  Political Economy Places: Global

[I discovered I had never forwarded this crucial explanation of the IPCC process of two reports for each of the six IPCC assessments—the scientific report produced by hundreds of scientists based upon thousands of published studies, and the redacted government/corporate final report.  If you had wondered why the final assessments had seemed to have understated their findings, you were reading the Ffnal, doctored document of each of the six assessments.  –Dick]

Time is running out for the world to carry out the social transformations necessary to avert irreversible climate catastrophe, keeping the increase in global average temperatures below 1.5°C (or below 2°C). The most optimistic scenario currently provided by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) describes a pathway in which the increase in temperature will not rise to 1.5°C until 2040, peaking at 1.6°C, and then falling back to 1.4°C by the end of this century. But to achieve this will require revolutionary scale transformational change in global social relations affecting the human relation to the climate and the planetary environment as a whole.

This was the clear message of the original draft by scientists of the most important climate change report to date: the Working Group III report on Mitigation of Climate Change of the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), authored by 278 scientists from sixty-five countries, and drawing on some 18,000 scientific studies. The scientific report was completed in August 2021. The final report was then published, following alterations by governments of The Summary for Policymakers (SPM), in April 2022. Yet, the final governmental-drafted SPM—the only part of the climate change report that is widely read and that affects policy—negated almost all of what scientists themselves had previously agreed on with respect to mitigation in their original draft of the SPM, creating a sharp divergence between this and the rest of the 2,900-page report.

It is crucial to understand that, in the IPCC process, the lead authors of the report arrive at a scientific consensus with respect to the entire climate report, including the all-important SPM. But, before the IPCC report is published, the SPM requires a second, supposedly higher consensus, known as the governmental consensus, in which governments (with corporate lobbyists looking over their shoulders) decide on the final SPM line by line, rewriting what the scientists provided. This means that the published SPM is no longer entirely the result of scientific deliberations but is negotiated by political-economic interests. Governmental actors, however, are not able to alter the climate report as a whole, only the SPM (Juan Bordera, “How the Corporate Interests and Political Elites Watered Down the World’s Most Important Climate Report,” MR Online, April 27, 2022). The justification for the twofold consensus process is that the governmental consensus is simply meant to modify the scientific consensus to account for political realities and in order to forge an international agreement. In the case of the Mitigation report for AR6, however, the governmental consensus took an extreme form that in effect entirely erased the scientific consensus that had preceded it. . . . [To read the entire report, click on Notes from the Editors above and scroll down to June 2022.]

The numerous changes to the SPM for the 2022 IPCC Mitigation report, which was altered in almost every line, dramatically highlight the role of vested interests in censoring the science. A number of examples will suffice. . . .

It is therefore necessary for those seriously concerned about the current climate emergency to rely primarily on the scientific report—that is, the published chapters of the report plus the leaked SPM, representing the actual scientific consensus. In contrast, the published, government (and corporation) redacted SPM should be entirely dismissed as the consensus of capital, and the betrayal of science, reason, and humanity. The science is clear. Without radical transformative social change that breaks with the logic of the existing mode of production and that points to a world of sustainable human development, there will be no future for humanity.

Monthly Review, Volume 74, Number 02 (June 2022).

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