The chart above was produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and compares how the group predicts sea levels will rise under a worst case scenario, in red, with how they’ll rise under a best case scenario, in blue.
According to its founders, the website Paradox was created to host nuanced discussion of otherwise politically charged issues, and climate change — particularly whether humans are to blame and what we should do about it — qualifies.
“The debate is filled with extreme deniers who say things like ‘CO2 doesn’t warm the planet’ and avid supporters who claim that, despite the uncertainty that permeates the measurements, the policies, the implementations, and the models, they can tell you exactly how much money we will lose in the next year due to climate change,” wrote Matthias Shapiro in a post for Paradox this fall.
The subject of climate change will be a particularly hot topic over the next two weeks, as world leaders gather in France for the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference, where attendees hope to reach a binding international agreement on greenhouse gas reductions.
And with such a wide chasm in rhetoric about the issue, Shapiro wrote that anyone trying to find middle ground on the subject must brace for hostility from both ends of the political spectrum.
But there is room — and scientific basis — for a third perspective, he wrote.
Poking some fun at the self-assuredness of many of the advocates on both sides of the topic, Shapiro wrote about the above chart: “If someone says they ‘know the science’ of climate change and don’t recognize this chart, they are liars.”
He suggested that even advocates who don’t agree with the IPCC’s projections should be familiar with the group’s widely cited baselines.
And while there is a big range between the highest predicted sea level rise shown and the lowest predicted sea level rise shown, there’s also a substantial overlap in possible outcomes between the worst case scenario and the best case scenario.
Shapiro pointed out that a 2.9 degree temperature increase and nearly two-foot sea-level rise can be found in both the IPCC’s best-case scenario, in which greenhouse gas emissions are sharply curbed, and its worst-case scenario, in which humans totally ignore the problem.
“If you went 85 years into the future and that was what it looked like, you would have no idea if we followed the most painful climate mitigation path possible or did nothing at all,” he wrote.
For a brief overview, the scientific consensus is basically that pollution is warming the planet, causing the polar ice caps to melt and add water to the Earth’s oceans. In reaction, U.S. President Barack Obama and many others in attendance at the United Nations conference hope to implement new measures to cut pollution, slow the warming cycle, preserve more of the ice caps and hold sea levels to a minimal rise in the coming years.
To be clear, Shapiro didn’t argue the planet’s temperatures aren’t changing or that CO2 emitted from human activities played no role in those changes.
He just argued for a balanced response to the crisis, considering the aforementioned possibility that the results of the most aggressive mediation plan and the least could be indistinguishable from one another.
Shapiro did acknowledge that the IPCC estimates are considered conservative by some, and that some groups are predicting climate change “four times more extreme than the worst IPCC models.”
But he described the panel’s reports as “compiled by earnest and honest scientists,” and said they provide a strong starting point for discussion.
“Reducing emissions is a laudable goal in isolation,” Shapiro wrote. “But the fact is that we cannot connect the kinds of emission changes in most modern policy reliably to any change in the climate over the next 85 years. We’re mostly projecting that less emissions mean lower temperatures. This is likely true, but we don’t know how much. …
Every policy I’ve seen to address climate change is about fiddling at the margins. … I don’t like being a cynic, but it’s hard for me to argue that we need to devote massive worldwide effort resulting in an immediate spike in energy costs in order to affect a 1-degree change that we will not be able to say was the direct result of our hard-fought and hard-won policies.”
