We may avoid the very worst climate scenario. But the next-worst is still pretty awful.
clock The year is 2100, and the worlds 12 billion people are still burning fossil fuels with abandon. Compared with preindustrial times, the planet has warmed by 4.5 degrees Celsius, or 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit. The atmosphere is filled with greenhouse gases, and parts of the Earth sometimes experience temperatures too extreme for humans. This bleak vision of the future has long played a significant role in scientific assessments of global warming. Sometimes called the business as usual scenario, it represents a worst case where countries continue to burn oil, gas and coal unabated in contrast with a world where emissions have been dramatically reduced, and global warming is more moderate. But now, some climate scientists and energy experts say the worst-case scenario is increasingly unlikely. Thats stirred debate within the research community over whether a rare bit of good news about global warming has emerged or if, instead, the situation is far more complicated and still quite dire. The stakes are high, since that drastic scenario technically dubbed RCP 8.5 could be used by policymakers when deciding what to do to mitigate global warming. In a commentary published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, Zeke Hausfather of the Breakthrough Institute, and Glen Peters, an energy expert at the Norwegian science organization CICERO, argue that the scenario ought to be discarded. Happily and thats a word we climatologists rarely get to use the world imagined in RCP 8.5 is one that, in our view, becomes increasingly implausible with every passing year, they write. Hausfather and Peters argue that a total warming of around 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) is where the world is probably headed. Thats severe it would be three times the amount of change that the world has seen but appreciably different from 4 to 5 degrees Celsius (7.2 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit). One of the most distinctive and, some critics say, objectionable aspects of the RCP 8.5 scenario is that it assumes heavy use of coal, the most carbon intensive fossil fuel when burned. Coal use goes up by a factor of five in the scenario, write Hausfather and Peters. But today, coal use is declining in many countries, including the United States, being supplanted by renewable energy and natural gas. Hausfather and Peters are not the first critics. The levels of coal use in the high-end warming scenario were always implausible given the worlds coal reserves, argues Hadi Dowlatabadi, a climate and energy expert at the University of British Columbia who has published critiques of the return to coal hypothesis. The coal resource that underlies the assumptions ... doesnt seem to be there, Dowlatabadi said. Yet scientists use the high warming scenario regularly in climate change studies, and especially climate model simulations, where one important goal is to push the Earths system to an extreme to see what happens. It is commonly referred to as a baseline or business as usual scenario, since it assumes nothing is done to mitigate climate change. This has given it a major prominence and has often led it to being framed as the default. In some cases, it has provided ammunition to those critical of assumptions used in climate modeling. For example, the White House dismissed a 2018 climate report produced by 13 federal agencies and outside experts in part because it included the scenario. We think this is the most extreme version, and its not based on facts, said then-press secretary Sarah Sanders. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler has already suggested the Trump administration may want to take a look at the modeling used in the next such assessment. However, researchers, including those who produced the federal report, generally pair the RCP 8.5 scenario with other scenarios that are less dire and involve more concerted climate change action. So it is not the only scenario used, and scientists have certainly not labeled it as a definite outcome. The most recent major assessment of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for instance, used four separate warming scenarios, of which RCP 8.5 was the most extreme. Moreover, many experts say the high levels of warming seen in RCP 8.5 are still possible. Indeed, they argue that at least until recently, the world appeared to be following the trajectory quite closely. Last I knew, we are still on the RCP 8.5 pathway as of 2019, so lets not get carried away too much with how unrealistic RCP 8.5 is, said Donald Wuebbles, a climate scientist at the University of Illinois and a leader of the U.S. National Climate Assessment process, which has included RCP 8.5 as one of the scenarios. RCP 8.5 has always been considered to be the high scenario a business as usual scenario if we continued with past practices, but few people thought that we would consider that pathway throughout. Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University who was a lead author of the 2018 National Climate Assessment, says there are still ample reasons for concern. Even a scenario involving lower greenhouse gas emissions could bring the magnitude of global warming foreseen in RCP 8.5, she said. The envelope of uncertainty surrounding the change that will result from a given amount of emissions is not symmetrical: it is weighted towards the worse side of the spectrum, she said in an email. One key issue: climate feedbacks, or processes by which the Earth responds to warming by releasing more greenhouse gases. This may already be underway in the Arctic. The Arctic may have crossed key threshold, emitting billions of tons of carbon into the air, in a long-dreaded climate feedback Its not just our emissions: its the response of the climate system to them, too, Hayhoe wrote. We have to weigh the probability of both of those pieces together to come out with the right answer. And thats what keeps us climate scientists up at night. Michael Mann, a climate researcher at Pennsylvania State University who is on a sabbatical in Australia, concurred, with a pointed reference to recent events. In the catastrophic fires here (which were enabled by climate change), twice as much carbon escaped into the atmosphere as was produced by all of fossil fuel burning in Australia over the last year, Mann wrote in an email. These sorts of amplifying carbon cycle feedback mechanisms are not accounted for in the simple sorts of projections that [Hausfather] and others are using. While the critique of RCP 8.5 has a long history, it is drawing new momentum for several reasons. First, the Paris climate agreement led to pledges by countries that, while hardly sufficient to hold warming to low levels, did appear to somewhat move the Earths trajectory in a better direction. Meanwhile, the growth of wind and solar energy around the world has shown that renewable energy can be adopted at scale, and relatively quickly, while coal use slows in many countries. Australias greenhouse gas emissions effectively double as a result of unprecedented bush fires A key question, though, is whether this all really amounts to good news, when the outlook is taken in its entirety. After all, scientists have increasingly determined that even relatively low levels of warming 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius come with intolerable consequences. Nearly all, or all, of the worlds coral reefs could be lost at these levels of warming, scientists believe. That would amount to irreversible damage to one of the Earths fundamental ecosystems. Indeed, roughly half of the Great Barrier Reef has died just within the past several years from extreme warming events that triggered severe coral bleaching. Meanwhile, scientists are already watching the West Antarctic ice sheet melt, which could raise sea levels by some 10 feet, were it to collapse entirely. In this context, 3 degrees Celsius of warming would be catastrophic anyway, Mann said. Peters and Hausfather argue that RCP 8.5 should be largely ignored by policymakers. In an interview, Peters said scientists who have used it in studies for years are fighting against efforts to de-emphasize this scenario, simply because theyve based their work on it. Thats just human nature, he said. Still, Hausfather agreed the issue of climate feedbacks remains important, and these could still potentially result in the level of global warming spelled out in the business as usual scenario. Our argument isnt that we should ignore the possibility of getting to 4 or 5 degrees Celsius of warming this century, Hausfather said. Its that you shouldnt be using unrealistic emissions scenarios to get there.