This was going to be a comment on Jaime’s excellent article

https://cliscep.com/2018/10/09/sr15-under-the-looking-glass-part-i-ipcc-claims-all-warming-is-now-anthropogenic/

but it got out of hand.

Here are some quotes from the Executive Summary of Chapter 1 of the report, with comments:

Depending on the temperature dataset considered, 20-40% of the global human population live in regions that, by the decade 2006-2015, had already experienced warming of more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial in at least one season (medium confidence)

So 20-40% of the global human population have already experienced warming of the kind which it is imperative to prevent spreading to the other 60-80%. What do they think about it? Has anyone asked them? That’s one and a half to three billion people. Would they like more expensive windmills and less cheap coal-fired power stations? Or would they prefer scarce resources to be spent on something else, like health or education? Who knows?

Ethical considerations, and the principle of equity in particular, are central to this report, recognising that many of the impacts of warming up to and beyond 1.5°C, and some potential impacts of mitigation actions required to limit warming to 1.5°C, fall disproportionately on the poor and vulnerable (high confidence). Equity has procedural and distributive dimensions and requires fairness in burden sharing, between generations, and between and within nations.

“..recognising that many of the impacts of warming up to and beyond 1.5°C … fall disproportionately on the poor and vulnerable..” presumably includes recognising that the impacts include positive ones, such as better crop yields, which presumably also “fall disproportionately”on those who till the earth, who tend also to be “the poor and vulnerable.”

This report focuses on ‘climate-resilient development pathways’ , which aim to meet the goals of sustainable development, including climate adaptation and mitigation, poverty eradication and reducing inequalities. But any feasible pathway that remains within 1.5°C involves synergies and trade-offs (high confidence). Significant uncertainty remains as to which pathways are more consistent with the principle of equity.

The “goals of sustainable development” are stated to include “climate adaptation and mitigation, poverty eradication and reducing inequalities.”

According to Wikipaedia:

Sustainable development is the organizing principle for meeting human development goals while at the same time sustaining the ability of natural systems to provide the natural resources and ecosystem services upon which the economy and society depend. The desired result is a state of society where living conditions and resource use continue to meet human needs without undermining the integrity and stability of the natural system. Sustainable development can be classified as development that meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations… the modern concept of sustainable development is derived mostly from the 1987 Brundtland Report..

Though climate resilience (or mitigation) may reasonably be considered as coming within the Wiki definition of “sustaining the ability of natural systems to provide the natural resources and ecosystem services upon which the economy and society depend,” there is nothing there about climate adaptation, poverty eradication and reducing inequalities. If existing inequalities were found to further the goal of sustainable development, e.g. by allowing billionaires like George Soros and Bill Gates to spend huge sums on it, then it follows from the Wiki definition that reducing inequalities would not be a goal of sustainable development. The IPCC is free to state its findings on the science, but not to define the meaning of goals to attain sustainable development.

Similarly, there is nothing in the IPCCs mandate that states that they must obey some undefined “principle of equity.” If Richard Branson wants to make millions trading carbon credits and rebranding himself as a friend of the Bolivian peasant, that’s his business. If he makes millions doing so and the Bolivian peasant gets shafted, that’s no business of the IPCC.

There is no single answer to the question of whether it is feasible to limit warming to 1.5°C and adapt to the consequences. Feasibility is considered in this report as the capacity of a system as a whole to achieve a specific outcome. The global transformation that would be needed to limit warming to 1.5°C requires enabling conditions that reflect the links, synergies and trade-offs between mitigation, adaptation and sustainable development. These enabling conditions have many systemic dimensions—geophysical, environmental-ecological, technological, economic, socio-cultural and institutional—that may be considered through the unifying lens of the Anthropocene, acknowledging profound, differential but increasingly geologically significant human influences on the Earth system as a whole. This framing also emphasises the global interconnectivity of past, present and future human–environment relations, highlighing [sic] the need and opportunities for integrated responses to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement.

Read the above, ye mighty and despair. Have ye waded through such a cesspit of gobshite since the last IPCC report? Temperatures have been rising by between 0.1°C and 0.2°C per decade since records began, give or take a few hundredths of a degree. And when records began carbon emissions were a thousandth or a hundredth or a somethingth of what they are now.

Take the sentence:

“The global transformation that would be needed to limit warming to 1.5°C requires enabling conditions that reflect the links, synergies and trade-offs between mitigation, adaptation and sustainable development.”

This is  shite nonsense that any editor of any serious newspaper would return to his environmental correspondent with a note scrawled over it: “This is shite nonsense.”

Mitigation and adaptation are not policies aimed at the same “global transformation” with “links, synergies and trade-offs.” Mitigation is spending trillions on windmills and suntraps in the vain hope of keeping civilisation going with electricity when the sun shines and the wind blows where you are. Adaptation is saying “Bollocks to mitigation. We want air conditioning here when it’s very hot. And if it doesn’t work, because the electricity supply isn’t working where it’s needed, like in Baghdad or Damascus or Tripoli, we want to know why.”

And lo and behold, the same countries that are likely to suffer the most from failure to adapt are those whose capacity for adaptation has been bombed to hell by the very same countries which are demanding that they switch to mitigation, by ceasing to export the fossil fuels which are their principle source of income.

These enabling conditions have many systemic dimensions—geophysical, environmental-ecological, technological, economic, socio-cultural and institutional—that may be considered through the unifying lens of the Anthropocene, acknowledging profound, differential but increasingly geologically significant human influences on the Earth system as a whole.

“..many systemic dimensions—geophysical, environmental-ecological, technological, economic, socio-cultural and institutional..” But also ecolo-sociological, psycho-environmental, techno-pataphysical, and arso-metaversical. Because through the unifying lens of the Anthropocene anything is possible. Because the Anthropocene has no scientific existence, any more than the Cliscepocene. And through the unifying lens of the Cliscepocene, the authors, of this report, or at least of the executive summary of the first chapter of this report, are revealed to be nematodes with a total number of neurons in the low hundreds.

Here endeth the lesson on the executive summary of the first chapter of IPCC/SR15. There are four further chapters, plus a glossary and “Changes to the Underlying Scientific-Technical Assessment to ensure consistency with the approved Summary for Policymakers.“

Gaia help us all.