The Dangerous Lie of ‘Science-Based’ Climate Action

The plan this week was to talk about climate doomism - the argument that the collapse of industrialised civilisation is now unavoidable. But today I need to take up some of your bandwidth with something else, because a meeting this week reminded me just how grossly insufficient climate policy is.

Towards the end of this meeting I ended up getting quite cross. I very much hope I didn’t act unprofessional in any way but afterwards I needed to go for a walk. The target of my ire? That seemingly innocuous statement “science-based”. Is there another hyphenated word that is doing as much damage to humanity’s prospects?

Before I get into it, this was a meeting held under Chatham House rules so I can’t say who said what. I also do not want to say who was there because I am not extending anyone the right of reply. It would also not be fair to take aim at any individual present because I was in esteemed and polite company and did not directly challenge anyone on how science-based was being (ab)used.

Science-based - to be grounded in scientific evidence, methods, and principles. As a scientists what’s not to love? Unfortunately when it come to the climate crisis, science-based has become worse than useless. In fact it’s positively dangerous. Let me explain.

The Paris Agreement is grounded on climate science. The very idea of trying to limit warming to any amount means using science to establish how much carbon can be put into the atmosphere before an amount of warming is reached. It is very similar to a tap pouring water into a bathtub. The wider and longer you open the tap, the more water flows in and the higher the water level. The climate’s sensitivity to human’s additional carbon flowing into the atmosphere is like how quickly the water level changes as a result of extra water flowing into the bathtub. So far so good.

In 2015, the international community agreed that it would do whatever is required to limit warming to ‘well below 2°C’. Since then, that has come to be understood as 1.5°C. Given that the long-term increase in global temperature is already lapping at 1.4°C, how much additional carbon can be put into the atmosphere? Perhaps less than 200 billion tons. That’s about five year’s worth of current global emissions. Recently, the World Meteorological Organisation assessed there is now a 70% chance that 5-year average warming for 2025-2029 will be more than 1.5 °C. Given that emissions are not rapidly falling, they are not stabilising, in fact continuing to increase, then a science-based assessment would conclude that the highest aspiration of the Paris Agreement is toast. What’s more, chances of 2°C will soon be quickly increasing.

My assumption coming into the meeting was that everyone else understood that, and so any organisation that seeks to use science to try to limit warming to no more than 1.5°C would have to think very carefully what it will do when 1.5°C is passed. Oh boy was I wrong. Haven’t I heard? 1.5 is still alive! How so? It’s because science-based actually means Paris-aligned. What does that mean?

If back in 2015 the International community had actually agreed to limit warming to well below 2°C then we would have seen the rapid implementation of policies that would slash carbon emissions. The climate science say that you need to turn off the flow of carbon in the atmosphere. That didn’t happen for two reason. First, the Paris Agreement very cleverly set temperature targets for the end of the century. Plenty of time to get politicians on board. Second, the Paris Agreement allowed for temperatures to exceed 1.5°C or any amount with the promise that nations make efforts to lower temperatures later. That wasn’t just very clever but extremely devious. Because it can allow a politician or CEO to say that their climate policy is ‘Paris aligned’ while not rapidly lowering carbon emissions - which is what the science ‘demands’.

So this is this just another example of carbon offsetting being abused? No! OK, yes, plenty of companies do misuse carbon offsets and there are systemic problems with voluntary carbon markets. The Paris Agreement wasn’t just offsetting current emissions, but laying the ground for a much more ambitious approach in which decades of delay would be effectively offset with large-scale carbon dioxide removal in the future. These two elements of the Paris Agreement we key to its success. Without both then I struggle to see how any industrialised nation would sign up because the alternative is near-term rapid decreases in emissions.

The problem is, I have repeatedly pointed out, large-scale carbon dioxide removal does not exist. Recently it was revealed that Climeworks’ Icelands Direct Air Capture plant - the great new hope for climate removal - had not even removed the amount of carbon dioxide that was released during its construction. From a climate perspective, it would have been better to simply not build the thing in the first place. But that’s not why it exists.

Climeworks is a remarkable company. It has received over a billion dollars of funding while not producing any sort of product. It’s really a services company with the service it provides being the promise of future technological solution to, for example, a big tech company that is spawning sprawling data centres that consume vast amounts of electricity, or a government that wants to continue the lie that we can merrily continue fossil-fuelled economic growth and avoid dangerous climate change.

Paris-aligned pathways are sold as a science-based pathways. And because the science is settled, because the science is objective, then there isn’t any debate about it. But imagining fantastical levels of deliberate climate intervention is not science-based. It’s bullshit-based.

I can understand why an organisation would not want to promote bullshit-based climate policies. A climate consultancy that offered world-class bullshit, while honest, may not attract many clients. But the facts speak for themselves. How many governments, corporations and other organisation are actually on track for zero emissions by 2050? What’s more, a real Paris-aligned pathway should have rich nations reaching zero much faster, around the middle of the 2030s. Do you see that happening? Even if we allow for the ever imprecise notion of ‘residual emissions’ to be effectively offset, do you see anyone, anywhere doing anything remotely compatible for limiting warming to 1.5°C?

Saying ‘Paris-aligned' is no answer. You can be science-based and talk about cumulative emissions and future warming but you do not get to use science to prop up the most fatuous speculation about carbon removal.

From now on, I will insist you use the term bullshit-based. This will probably mean I end up being invited to fewer meetings. That alone may be reason to persist.