What Lies Beneath: The scientific understatement of climate risks

Abstract

OVERVIEW
Human-induced climate change is an existential risk to human civilisation: an adverse outcome that would either annihilate intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential.
Special precautions that go well beyond conventional risk management practice are required if the “fat tails” — the increased likelihood of very large impacts — are to be adequately dealt with. The potential consequences of these lower-probability, but higher-impact events would be devastating for human societies.
The bulk of climate research has tended to underplay these risks, and exhibited a preference for conservative projections and scholarly reticence, albeit increasing numbers of scientists have spoken out in recent years on the dangers of such an approach.
Climate policymaking and the public narrative are significantly informed by the important work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). However, IPCC reports also tend toward reticence and caution, erring on the side of “least drama”, and downplaying more extreme and more damaging outcomes. Whilst this has been understandable historically, given the pressure exerted upon the IPCC by political and vested interests, it is now becoming dangerously misleading, given the acceleration of climate impacts globally. What were lower-probability, higher-impact events are now becoming more likely.
This is a particular concern with potential climatic “tipping points” — passing critical thresholds which result in step changes in the system — such as the polar ice sheets (and hence sea levels), and permafrost and other carbon stores, where the impacts of global warming are non-linear and difficult to model at present. Under-reporting on these issues contributes to the “failure of imagination” that is occurring today in our understanding of, and response to, climate change.
If climate policymaking is to be soundly based, a reframing of scientific research within an existential risk-management framework is now urgently required. This must be taken up not just in the work of the IPCC, but also in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change negotiations if we are to address the real climate challenge.
Current processes will not deliver either the speed or the extent of change required.

Full text

WHAT
BENEATH
THE SCIENTIFIC UNDERSTATEMENT OF CLIMATE RISKS
BY DAVID SPRATT & IAN DUNLOP
LIES

CONTENTS
OVERVIEW 1
INTRODUCTION 2
EXCESSIVE CAUTION 4
POLITICISATION 5
UNDERESTIMATION OF RISKS 7
CLIMATE MODELS 10
TIPPING POINTS 11
CLIMATE SENSITIVITY 12
PERMAFROST 14
CARBON BUDGETS 15
ARCTIC SEA ICE 16
POLAR ICE MASS LOSS 17
SEA-LEVEL RISE 19
POLITICAL CONSENSUS 21
GOALS ABANDONED 22
A FAILURE OF IMAGINATION 23 AUTHORS
DAVID SPRATT
David Spratt is Research Director for Breakthrough
and co-author of
Climate Code Red: The case for
emergency action
. His recent reports include
Recount: It’s time to “Do the math” again
,
Climate Reality Check, Antarctic Tipping Points for
a Multi-metre Sea-level Rise
and
Disaster Alley:
Climate change, conict and risk
(with Ian Dunlop)
IAN DUNLOP
Ian Dunlop is a senior member of the Advisory
Board for Breakthrough. Ian was an international
oil, gas and coal industry executive, chairman of the
Australian Coal Association and chief executive of
the Australian Institute of Company Directors. From
1998-2000 he chaired the Australian Greenhouse
Ofce Experts Group on Emissions Trading. He is a
member of the Club of Rome.
Published by Breakthrough - National Centre for Climate Restoration
Melbourne, Australia | September 2017 breakthroughonline.org.au

OVERVIEW
Human-induced climate change is an existential risk to human civilisation: an adverse outcome
that would either annihilate intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential.
Special precautions that go well beyond conventional risk management practice are required if
the “fat tails” — the increased likelihood of very large impacts — are to be adequately dealt with.
The potential consequences of these lower-probability, but higher-impact, events would be
devastating for human societies.
The bulk of climate research has tended to underplay these risks, and exhibited a preference for
conservative projections and scholarly reticence, albeit increasing numbers of scientists have
spoken out in recent years on the dangers of such an approach.
Climate policymaking and the public narrative are significantly informed by the important work of
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). However, IPCC reports also tend
toward reticence and caution, erring on the side of “least drama”, and downplaying more extreme
and more damaging outcomes. Whilst this has been understandable historically, given the
pressure exerted upon the IPCC by political and vested interests, it is now becoming
dangerously misleading, given the acceleration of climate impacts globally. What were
lower-probability, higher-impact, events are now becoming more likely.
This is a particular concern with potential climatic “tipping points” — passing critical thresholds
which result in step changes in the system — such as the polar ice sheets (and hence sea
levels), and permafrost and other carbon stores, where the impacts of global warming are
non-linear and difficult to model at present. Under-reporting on these issues contributes to the
“failure of imagination” that is occurring today in our understanding of, and response to, climate
change.
If climate policymaking is to be soundly based, a reframing of scientific research within an
existential risk-management framework is now urgently required. This must be taken up not just
in the work of the IPCC, but also in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change
negotiations if we are to address the real climate challenge.
Current processes will not deliver either the speed or the extent of change required.

WHAT LIES BENEATH  1 

INTRODUCTION
Three decades ago, when serious debate on human-induced climate change began at the global level, a great deal of
statesmanship was on display. There was a preparedness to recognise that this was an issue transcending nation states,
ideologies and political parties which had to be addressed proactively in the long-term interests of humanity as a whole,
even if the existential nature of the risk it posed was far less clear cut than it is today.
As global institutions were established to take up this challenge, such as the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change
(UNFCCC) at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, and the extent of change this would demand of the fossil-fuel-dominated world
order became clearer, the forces of resistance began to mobilise. Today, as a consequence, and despite the diplomatic
triumph of the 2015 Paris


Agreement

, the debate around climate change policy has never been more dysfunctional, indeed
Orwellian.
In his book 1984, George Orwell describes a double-speak totalitarian state where most of the population accepts “the most
flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not
sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane.”
Orwell could have been writing about climate change and policymaking. International agreements talk of limiting global
warming to 1.5–2°C, but in reality they set the world on a path of 3–5°C. Goals are reaffirmed, only to be abandoned. Coal
is “clean”. Just 1°C of warming is already dangerous, but this cannot be said. The planetary future is hostage to myopic
national self-interest. Action is delayed on the assumption that as yet unproven technologies will save the day, decades
hence. The risks are existential, but it is “alarmist”

 to say so. A one-in-two chance of missing a goal is normalised as
reasonable.
Climate policymaking for years has been cognitively dissonant, “a flagrant violation of reality”. So it is unsurprising that there
is a lack of a understanding amongst the public and elites of the full measure of the climate challenge. Yet most Australians
sense where we are heading: three-quarters of Australians see climate change as catastrophic risk,  and half see our way
1
of life ending within the next 100 years.
2
Politics and policymaking have norms: rules and practices, assumptions and boundaries, that constrain and shape them. In
recent years, the previous norms of statesmanship and long-term thinking have disappeared, replaced by an obsession with
short-term political and commercial advantage   Climate policymaking is no exception.
Since 1992, short-term economic interest has trumped environmental and future human needs. The world today emits 48%
more carbon dioxide (CO2) from the consumption of energy than it did 25 years ago, and the global economy has more than
doubled in size. The UNFCCC strives "to


enable


economic


development


to


proceed


in


a


sustainable


manner”

, but every
year humanity’s ecological footprint becomes larger and less sustainable. Humanity now requires the biophysical capacity
of 1.7 planets annually to survive as it rapidly chews up the natural capital.
A fast, emergency-scale transition to a post-fossil fuel world is absolutely necessary to address climate change. But this is
excluded from consideration by policymakers because it is considered to be too disruptive. The orthodoxy is that there is
1 CommunicateResearch 2017, ‘Global Challenges Foundation global risks survey’, ComRes

, 24 May 2017,
<http://www.comresglobal.com/polls/global-challenges-foundation-global-risks-survey>.
2 Randle, MJ & Eckersley, R 2015, ‘Public perceptions of future threats to humanity and different societal responses: a cross-national study’,
Futures

, vol. 72, pp. 4-16.
WHAT LIES BENEATH  2 

time for an orderly economic transition within the current short-termist political paradigm. Discussion of what would be safe
–– less warming that we presently experience –– is non-existent. And so we have a policy failure of epic proportions.
Policymakers, in their magical thinking, imagine a mitigation path of gradual change, to be constructed over many decades
in a growing, prosperous world. The world not imagined is the one that now exists: of looming financial instability; of a global
crisis of political legitimacy; of a sustainability crisis that extends far beyond climate change to include all the fundamentals
of human existence and most significant planetary boundaries (soils, potable water, oceans, the atmosphere, biodiversity,
and so on); and of severe global energy sector dislocation.
In anticipation of the upheaval that climate change would impose upon the global order, the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC), was established by the UN in 1988, charged with regularly assessing the global consensus on
climate science as a basis for policymaking.  The IPCC Assessment


Reports

 (AR

), produced every 5–6 years, play a large
part in the public framing of the climate narrative: new reports are a global media event.  AR5

 was produced in 2013-14,
with AR6

 due in 2022. The IPCC has done critical, indispensable work of the highest standard in pulling together a periodic
consensus of what must be the most exhaustive scientific investigation in world history.  It does not carry out its own
research, but reviews and collates peer-reviewed material from across the spectrum of this incredibly complex area,
identifying key issues and trends for policymaker consideration.
However, the IPCC process suffers from all the dangers of consensus-building in such a wide-ranging and complex arena.
For example, IPCC reports, of necessity, do not always contain the latest available information.  Consensus-building can
lead to “least drama”, lowest-common-denominator outcomes which overlook critical issues. This is particularly the case
with the “fat-tails” of probability distributions, that is, the high-impact but relatively low-probability events where scientific
knowledge is more limited.  Vested interest pressure is acute in all directions; climate denialists accuse the IPCC of
alarmism, whereas climate action proponents consider the IPCC to be far too conservative. To cap it all, the IPCC
conclusions are subject to intense political oversight before being released, which historically has had the effect of
substantially watering-down sound scientific findings.
These limitations are understandable, and arguably were not of overriding importance in the early period of the IPCC.
However, as time has progressed, it is now clear that the risks posed by climate change are far greater than previously
anticipated.  We have moved out of the twilight period of much talk but relatively limited climate impacts. Climate change is
now turning nasty, as we have witnessed in 2017 in the USA, South Asia, the Middle East and Europe, with record-breaking
heatwaves and wildfires, more intense flooding and more damaging hurricanes.
The distinction between climate science and risk is now the critical issue, for the two are not the same.  Scientific reticence
— a reluctance to spell out the full risk implications of climate science in the absence of perfect information — has become
a major problem. Whilst this is understandable, particularly when scientists are continually criticised by denialists and
political apparatchiks for speaking out, it is extremely dangerous given the “fat tail” risks of climate change.  Waiting for
perfect information, as we are continually urged to do by political and economic elites, means it will be too late to act.
Irreversible, adverse climate change on the global scale now occurring is an existential risk to human civilisation.   Many of
3
the world’s top climate scientists quoted in this report well understand these implications — James Hansen, Michael E.
Mann, John Schellnhuber, Kevin Anderson, Eric Rignot, Naomi Oreskes, Kevin Trenberth, Michael Oppenheimer, Stefan
Rahmstorf and others — and are forthright about their findings, where we are heading, and the limitations of IPCC reports.
3 Dunlop, I & Spratt, D 2017, Disaster


Alley:


Climate


change,


conflict


and


risk

, Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration,
Melbourne.
WHAT LIES BENEATH  3 

This report seeks to alert the wider community and leaders to these limitations and urges change to the IPCC approach,
and to the wider UNFCCC negotiations.  It is clear that existing processes will not deliver the transformation to a carbon
negative world in the limited time now available.
We urgently require a reframing of scientific research within an existential risk-management framework.  This requires
special precautions that go well beyond conventional risk management. Like an iceberg, there is great danger “In what lies
beneath”.
EXCESSIVE CAUTION
A 2013 study by Naomi Oreskes and fellow researchers examined a number of past predictions made by climate scientists,
and found they have been “conservative in their projections of the impacts of climate change” and that “at least some of the
key attributes of global warming from increased atmospheric greenhouse gases have been under-predicted, particularly in
IPCC assessments of the physical science”. They concluded that climate scientists are not biased toward alarmism but
rather the reverse of “erring on the side of least drama [ESLD], whose causes may include adherence to the scientific
norms of restraint, objectivity, skepticism, rationality, dispassion, and moderation”. ESLD may cause scientists “to
underpredict or downplay future climate changes”.
4
This tallies with the views of economist Prof. Ross Garnaut, who in 2011 reflected on his experience in presenting two
climate reports to the Australian Government. Garnaut questioned whether climate research had a conservative “systematic
bias” due to “scholarly reticence”.  He pointed to a pattern across diverse intellectual fields of research predictions being
“not too far away from the mainstream” expectations and observed that in the climate field that this “has been associated
with understatement of the risks”.
5
As far back as 2007, then NASA climate science chief Prof. James Hansen suggested that scientific reticence hinders
communication with the public about dangers of global warming and  potentially large sea-level rises.  More recently he
wrote that: “the affliction is widespread and severe. Unless recognized, it may severely diminish our chances of averting
dangerous climate change”.
6
Ten years after his 2006 climate report to the UK government, Sir Nicholas Stern reflected that: “science is telling us that
impacts of global warming – like ice sheet and glacier melting – are now happening much more quickly than we
anticipated”.  In 2013 he said that "Looking back, I underestimated the risks… Some of the effects are coming through more
7
quickly than we thought then.”
8
A recent study of climate scientists found "a community which still identified strongly with an idealised picture of scientific
rationality, in which the job of scientists is to get on with their research quietly and dispassionately". The study said most
4 Brysse, K, Oreskes, N, O’Reilly, J & Oppenheimer, M 2013, ‘Climate change prediction: Erring on the side of least drama?’, Global
Environmental


Change

, vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 327-337.
5 Garnaut, R 2011, Update


Paper


5:


The


science


of


climate


change,


Garnaut Climate Change Review Update, Canberra, pp. 53-55.
6 Hansen, J 2007, ‘Scientific reticence and sea level rise’, Environmental


Research


Letters

, vol. 2, no. 2, 024002.
7 McKee, R 2016, ‘Nicholas Stern: cost of global warming “is worse than I feared”’, The Guardian, 6 November 2016,
<https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/nov/06/nicholas-stern-climate-change-review-10-years-on-interview-decisive-years-huma
nity>
8 Stewart, H & Elliott, L 2013, ‘Nicholas Stern: “I got it wrong on climate change – it's far, far worse”’, The Guardian, 27 January 2013,
<https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/jan/27/nicholas-stern-climate-change-davos>
WHAT LIES BENEATH  4 

climate scientists are resistant to participation in public/policy engagement, leaving this task to a minority who are attacked
by the media and even by their own colleagues. 
9
Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research and a lead author of key
sections of the 2001 and 2007 IPCC reports, says: "We're underestimating the fact that climate change is rearing its head…
and we're underestimating the role of humans, and this means we're underestimating what it means for the future and what
we should be planning for."
10
Prof. Michael E. Mann of Pennsylvania State University says the IPCC’s 2012 report on climate extremes missed an
opportunity to provide politicians with a clear picture of the extent of the climate crisis: "Many scientists felt that report erred
by underplaying the degree of confidence in the linkage between climate change and certain types of severe weather,
including heat wave severity, heavy precipitation and drought, and hurricane intensity.”
11
Prof. Kevin Anderson of the University of Manchester says there is "an endemic bias prevalent amongst many of those
building emission scenarios to underplay the scale of the 2°C challenge. In several respects, the modelling community is
actually self-censoring its research (focus) to conform to the dominant political and economic paradigm… ".
12
A good example is the 1.5°C target agreed to at the Paris December 2015 climate policy conference. IPCC assessment
reports until that time (and in conformity with the dominant political paradigm) had not devoted any significant attention to
1.5°C emission-reduction scenarios, and the Paris delegates had to request the IPCC to do so as a matter of urgency. This
is a clear case of politics driving the science research agenda. Research needs money, and too often money is allocated
according to the political priorities of the day.
Anderson says it is incumbent on the scientific community to communicate research clearly and candidly to those delivering
on the climate goals established by civil society, and "to draw attention to inconsistencies, misunderstandings and
deliberate abuse of the scientific research. It is not our job to be politically expedient with our analysis or to curry favour with
our funders. Whether our conclusions are liked or not is irrelevant."
13
POLITICISATION
Much has been written about the inadequacy of IPCC processes, and the politicisation of decision-making.
Scientists say one reason the IPCC's work is too conservative is that unwieldy processes mean reports do not take the most
recent research into account. The cutoff point for science to be considered in a report is so far in advance of publication that
the reports are out of date upon release. This is a crucial failure in a field of research that is rapidly changing.  Inez Fung at
9 Hoggett, P & Randall, R 2016, ‘Socially constructed silence? Protecting policymakers from the unthinkable’, Transformation

, 6 June 2016,
<https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/paul-hoggett-rosemary-randall/socially-constructed-silence-protecting-policymakers-fr>.
10 Scherer, G 2012a, ‘How the IPCC underestimated climate change’, Scientific


American

, 6 December 2012,
<https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-ipcc-underestimated-climate-change>.
11 Scherer, G 2012b, ‘Climate science predictions prove too conservative’, Scientific


American

, 6 December 2012,
<https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-science-predictions-prove-too-conservative>.
12 Anderson, K 2016, ‘Going beyond ‘dangerous’ climate change’, LSE presentation, 4 February 2016,
<http://www.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/videoAndAudio/channels/publicLecturesAndEvents/player.aspx?id=3363>.
13 Anderson, K 2015, ‘Duality in climate science’, Nature


Geoscience

, vol. 8, pp. 898–900.
WHAT LIES BENEATH  5 

the Berkeley Institute of the Environment, California says that for her research to be considered in the 2007 IPCC report,
she had to complete it by 2004. This is a typical experience that she identifies as "an awful lag in the IPCC process". 
14
IPCC Assessment


Reports

 are compiled by working groups of scientists within guidelines that urge the building of
consensus conclusions from evidence presented, though that evidence itself may be diverse and sometimes contradictory
in nature. The general result may be described as “middle of the road” reporting, in which propositions supported by the
greater quantity of research papers presented win out against propositions that might be outliers in terms of quantity of
papers presented, though the latter may be no less scientifically significant.
The higher-impact possibilities may have less research available for consideration, but there are good risk-management
reasons for giving such possibilities more prominence, even if the event probability is relatively low (see Underestimating
Risk

 below).
As one example, the projected sea-level rise in the 2007 assessment report was well below the subsequent observations.
This occurred because scientists compiling the report could not agree on how much would be added to sea-level rise by
melting polar ice sheets, and so left out the data altogether to reach “consensus”. Science historian Naomi Oreskes calls
this "consensus by omission".
15
This is the consensus problem at the scientific level, but there is a second problem at the political level. Whilst the full-length
IPCC Assessment


Reports

 are compiled by scientists, the shorter and more widely reported Summary


for


Policymakers
(SPM

) require consensus from diplomats in “a painstaking, line-by-line revision by [political] representatives from more than
100 world governments — all of whom must approve the final summary document”.
16
As early as the IPCC's first report in 1990, US, Saudi and Russian delegations acted in “watering down the sense of the
alarm in the wording, beefing up the aura of uncertainty”.  Prof. Martin Parry of the UK Met Office, co-chairman of an IPCC
17
working group at the time, has exposed the arguments between scientists and political officials over the 2007 IPCC SPM

:
"Governments don't like numbers, so some numbers were brushed out of it".
18
In 2014, The

 Guardian

 reported of increasing evidence that "the policy summaries on climate impacts and mitigation by the
IPCC were significantly 'diluted' under political pressure from some of the world's biggest greenhouse gas emitters,
including Saudi Arabia, China, Brazil and the United States".
19
One of the 2014 report’s more powerful sections was deleted during last minute negotiations over the text. The section tried
to specify other measures that would indicate whether we are entering a danger zone of profound climate impact, and just
how dramatic emissions cuts will have to be in order to avoid crossing that threshold. Prof. Michael Oppenheimer, an
eminent climate scientist at Princeton who was also part of the core writing team, suggests that politics got in the way. 
20
14 Barras, C 2007, ‘Rocketing CO2 prompts criticisms of IPCC’, New


Scientist

, 24 October 2007,
<https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19626274-800-rocketing-co2-prompts-criticisms-of-ipcc/>.
15 Scherer 2012a, op cit.
16 Ibid.
17 Leggett, J 1999,The


Carbon


War:


Global


warming


and


the


end


of


the


oil


era,


Routledge, New York.
18 Adam, D 2007, ‘How climate change will affect the world’, The


Guardian

, 20 September 2007,
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/sep/19/climatechange>.
19 Ahmed, N 2014, ‘IPCC reports 'diluted' under 'political pressure' to protect fossil fuel interests’, The


Guardian

, 15 May 2014,
<https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/may/15/ipcc-un-climate-reports-diluted-protect-fossil-fuel-interests>.
20 Leggett, J 2014, ‘Why two crucial pages were left out of the latest UN climate report’, Jeremy


Leggett,


4 November 2014,
<http://www.jeremyleggett.net/2014/11/why-two-crucial-pages-were-left-out-of-the-latest-u-n-climate-report/>.
WHAT LIES BENEATH  6 

UNDERESTIMATION OF RISKS
IPCC reports have underplayed high-end possibilities and failed to assess risks in a balanced manner. The failure to fully
account for potential future changes in the permafrost layer and other carbon-cycle feedbacks is just one example.
Dr Barrie Pittock, a former leader of the Climate Impact Group in CSIRO, wrote in 2006 that: "until now many scientists may
have consciously or unconsciously downplayed the more extreme possibilities at the high end of the uncertainty range, in
an attempt to appear moderate and ‘responsible’ (that is, to avoid scaring people). However, true responsibility is to provide
evidence of what must be avoided: to define, quantify, and warn against possible dangerous or unacceptable outcomes."
21
The situation has not improved. Sir Nicholas Stern said of the IPCC’s Fifth


Assessment


Report:

 “Essentially it reported on a
body of literature that had systematically and grossly underestimated the risks [and costs] of unmanaged climate change.”
22
Prof. Ross Garnaut has also pointed to the "understatement of the risks”. We seem to be playing scientific catch-up, as
reality is consistently on the most pessimistic boundary of previous projections. The Australian Climate Council reported in
2015: "Changes in the climate system are occurring more rapidly than previously projected, with larger and more damaging
impacts now observed at lower temperatures than previously estimated."   Such a situation is not a satisfactory basis on
23
which to plan our future.
Former senior coal fossil fuel executive and government advisor, Ian Dunlop, notes that: "dangerous impacts from the
underlying (warming) trend have also manifested far faster and more extensively than global leaders and negotiators are
prepared to recognise".
24
Researchers say it is important to carry out analyses “to identify what risky outcomes are possible — cannot be ruled out —
starting with the biggest ones. In such analyses, it is useful to distinguish between two questions: ‘What is most likely to
happen?’ and ‘How bad could things get?’”  In looking at how to reframe climate change assessments around risk, it is
25
important to:
… deal adequately with low-probability, high-consequence outcomes, which can dominate calculations of total risk,
and are thus worthy of special attention. Without such efforts, we court the kinds of ‘failures of imagination’ that can
prove so costly across risk domains. Traditional climate assessments have focused primarily on areas where the
science is mature and uncertainties well characterized. For example, in the IPCC lexicon, future outcomes are
considered “unlikely” if they lie outside the central 67% of the probability distribution. For many types of risk
assessment, however, a 33% chance of occurrence would be very high; a 1% or 0.1% chance (or even lower
probabilities) would be more typical thresholds. They emphasise that ‘the envelope of possibilities’, that is the full
range of possibilities for which one must be prepared, is often more important than the most likely future outcome,
especially when the range of outcomes includes those that are particularly severe. They conclude that the
“application of scientific rather than risk-based norms in communicating climate change uncertainty has also made
it easier for policymakers and other actors to downplay relevant future climate risks.
26
21 Pittock, AB 2006, ‘Are scientists underestimating climate change?’, EOS

, vol. 87, no. 34, pp. 340-41.
22 Stern, N 2016, ‘Economics: Current climate models are grossly misleading’, Nature

, vol. 530, pp. 407-409.
23 Steffen, W, Hughes, L & Pearce, A 2015, Climate


Change:


Growing


risks,


critical


choices

, Climate Council, Sydney.
24 Dunlop, I 2016, Foreword to Spratt, D 2016, Climate


Reality


Check

, Breakthrough, Melbourne.
25 Weaver, C, Moss, R, Ebi, K, Gleick, P, Stern, P, Tebaldi, C, Wilson, R & Arvai, J 2017, ‘Reframing climate change assessments around
risk: recommendations for the US National Climate Assessment’, Environmental


Research


Letters

, vol. 12, no. 8, 080201.
26 Ibid.
WHAT LIES BENEATH  7 

A prudent risk-management approach means a tough and objective look at the real risks to which we are exposed,
especially those high-end events who consequences may be damaging beyond quantification, and which human civilization
as we know it would be lucky to survive. It is important to understand the potential of, and plan for, the worst that can
happen, and be pleasantly surprised if it doesn’t. Focusing on "middle of the road" outcomes, and ignoring the high-end
possibilities, may result in an unexpected catastrophic event that we could and should have seen coming.
Integral to this approach is the issue of “fat tail” risks in which  the likelihood of very large impacts is greater than we would
expect under typical statistical assumptions. A normal distribution, with the appearance of a bell curve, is symmetric in
probabilities of low outcomes (left of curve) and high outcomes (right of curve) as per Figure 1(a).  But, as Prof. Michael E.
Mann explains, “global warming instead displays what we call a ‘heavy-tailed’ or ‘fat-tailed’ distribution. There is more area
under the far right extreme of the curve than we would expect for a normal distribution, a greater likelihood of warming that
is well in excess of the average amount of warming predicted by climate models”.
27
Figure 1: Normal probability distribution (left) and An estimate of the likelihood of warming due to a doubling of greenhouse gas concentrations, from
Wagner & Weitzman “Climate Shock” (right)
In Climate


Shock:


The


Economic


Consequences


of


a


Hotter


Planet

, economists Gernot Wagner and Martin Weitzman
explore the implications of this fat-tail distribution for climate policy, and “why we face an existential threat in human-caused
climate change”.  Mann explains:
28
Let us consider...the prospects for warming well in excess of what we might term “dangerous” (typically considered
to be at least 2°C warming of the planet). How likely, for example, are we to experience a catastrophic 6°C
warming of the globe, if we allow greenhouse gas concentrations to reach double their pre-industrial levels
(something we’re on course to do by the middle of this century given business-as-usual burning of fossil fuels)?
Well, the mean or average warming that is predicted by models in that scenario is about 3°C, and the standard
deviation about 1.5°C. So the positive tail, defined as the +2 sigma limit, is about 6°C of warming. As shown by
Wagner & Weitzman [Figure 1(b) above], the likelihood of exceeding that amount of warming isn’t 2% as we would
expect for a bell-curve distribution. It’s closer to 10%!
In fact, it’s actually even worse than that when we consider the associated risk. Risk is defined as the product of
the likelihood and consequence of an outcome. We just saw that the likelihood of warming is described by a
heavy-tailed distribution, with a higher likelihood of far-greater-than-average amounts of warming than we would
expect given typical statistical assumptions. This is further compounded by the fact that the damages caused by
climate change — i.e. the consequence — also increases dramatically with warming. That further increases the
associated risk.
27 Mann, M 2016, ‘The ‘fat tail’ of climate change risk’, Huffington


Post

, 11 September 2016,
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-e-mann/the-fat-tail-of-climate-change-risk_b_8116264.html>.
28 Ibid.
WHAT LIES BENEATH  8 

With additional warming comes the increased likelihood that we exceed certain “tipping points”, like the melting of
large parts of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheet and the associated massive rise in sea level that would
produce…  Uncertainty is not our friend when it comes to the prospects for dangerous climate change.
29
IPCC reports have not given attention to fat-tail risk analysis, in part because the reports are compiled using a consensus
method, as discussed above. Prof. Stefan Rahmstorf of Potsdam University says that: “The magnitude of the fat tail risks of
global warming is not widely appreciated and must be discussed more. For over two decades I have argued that the risk of
a collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation in this century is perhaps five per cent or so, but that this is far
too great a risk to take, given what is at stake. Nobody would board an aircraft with a five per cent risk of crashing.” He adds
that: "Defeatism and doomerism is not the same as an accurate, sincere and sober discussion of worst-case risks. We don’t
need the former, we do need the latter.”
30
It is now clear that climate change is an existential risk to human civilisation: that is, an adverse outcome that would either
annihilate intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential.  Temperature rises that are now in prospect,
31
ever after the Paris


Agreement

, are in the range of 3–5°C. The Paris


Agreement

 voluntary emission reduction
commitments, if implemented, would result in the planet warming by 3°C, without taking into account “long-term”
carbon-cycle feedbacks. With a higher climate sensitivity figure of 4.5°C, for example, which would account for such
feedbacks, the Paris path would lead to around 5°C of warming, according to a MIT study.  A study by Schroder
32
Investment Management published in June 2017 found — after taking into account indicators across a wide range of the
political, financial, energy and  regulatory sectors — the average temperature increase implied across all sectors was 4.1°C.
33
Warming of 4°C or more could reduce the global human population by 80% or 90%,  and the World Bank reports “there is
34
no certainty that adaptation to a 4°C world is possible”.  A study by two US national security think tanks concluded that 3°C
35
of warming and a 0.5 metre sea-level rise would likely lead to “outright chaos”.   A recent study by the European
36
Commission’s Joint Research Centre found that if global temperatures rise 4°C, then extreme heatwaves with “apparent
temperatures” peaking at over 55°C will begin to regularly affect many densely populated parts of the world. At 55°C or so,
much activity in the modern industrial world would have to stop. (“Apparent temperatures” refers to the Heat Index, which
quantifies the combined effect of heat and humidity to provide people with a means of avoiding dangerous conditions.)
37
29 Ibid.
30 Rahmstorf, S, pers. comm., 8 August 2017.
31 Dunlop and Spratt 2017, op cit.
32 Reilly, J, Paltsev, S, Monier, E, Chen, H, Sokolov, A, Huang, J, Ejaz, Q, Scott, J, Morris, J & Schlosser, A 2015, Energy


and


Climate
Outlook:


Perspectives


from


2015

, MIT Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, Cambridge MA.
33 Schroder Investment Management 2017, Climate


change:


calibrating


the


thermometer,

 Schroders Investment Management, London,
<www.schroders.com/globalassets/global-assets/english/pdf/c00140-climatedashboard_section.pdf>.
34 Anderson, K 2011, ‘Going beyond dangerous climate change: Exploring the void between rhetoric and reality in reducing carbon
emissions’, LSE presentation, 11 July 2011,
<http://www.slideshare.net/DFID/professor-kevin-anderson-climate-change-going-beyond-dangerous>; Fyall, J 2009, ‘Warming will 'wipe
out billions’, The


Scotsman

, 29 November 2009,
<http://www.webcitation.org/5ul6K9Jmt?url=http://news.scotsman.com/latestnews/Warming-will-39wipe-out-billions39.5867379.jp>.
35 World Bank 2012, Turn


Down


the


Heat:


Why


a


4°C


warmer


world


must


be


avoided

, World Bank, New York.
36 Campbell, K, Gulledge, J, McNeill, JR, Podesta, J, Ogden, P, Fuerth, L, Woolsley, J, Lennon, A, Smith, J, Weitz, R & Mix, D 2007, The
Age


of


Consequences:


The


foreign


policy


and


national


security


implications


of


global


climate


change

, Centre for Strategic and International
Studies & Centre for New American Security, Washington.
37 Ayre, J 2017, ‘Extreme heatwaves with ‘apparent temperatures’ as high as 55° celsius to regularly affect much of world’,


CleanTechnica

,
11 August 2017,
<https://cleantechnica.com/2017/08/11/extreme-heatwaves-apparent-temperatures-high-55-celsius-regularly-affect-much-world-4-celsius-w
arming-pre-industrial-levels/>.
WHAT LIES BENEATH  9 

CLIMATE MODELS
The 2007 report on climate change and national security by the US Center for Strategic and International Studies and the
Center for a New American Security recognised that: “Recent observations indicate that projections from climate models
have been too conservative; the effects of climate change are unfolding faster and more dramatically than expected” and
that “multiple lines of evidence” support the proposition that the 2007 IPCC report’s “projections of both warming and
attendant impacts are systematically biased low”.  For instance:
the models used to project future warming either omit or do not account for uncertainty in potentially important
positive feedbacks that could amplify warming (e.g., release of greenhouse gases from thawing permafrost,
reduced ocean and terrestrial CO2 removal from the atmosphere), and there is some evidence that such feedbacks
may already be occurring in response to the present warming trend. Hence, climate models may underestimate the
degree of warming from a given amount of greenhouse gases emitted to the atmosphere by human activities
alone. Additionally, recent observations of climate system responses to warming (e.g., changes in global ice cover,
sea-level rise, tropical storm activity) suggest that IPCC models underestimate the responsiveness of some
aspects of the climate system to a given amount of warming.
38
There is a consistent pattern in the IPCC of presenting detailed, quantified (numerical) modelling results, but then briefly
noting more severe possibilities — such as feedbacks that the models do not account for — in a descriptive, non-quantified
form. Sea levels, Arctic sea ice and some carbon-cycle feedbacks are three examples. Because policymakers and the
media are often drawn to headline numbers, this approach results in less attention being given to the most devastating,
high-end, non-linear and difficult-to-quantify outcomes.
Consensus around numerical results can result in an understatement of the risks. Oppenheimer et al. point to the problem:
The emphasis on consensus in IPCC reports has put the spotlight on expected outcomes, which then become
anchored via numerical estimates in the minds of policymakers… it is now equally important that policymakers
understand the more extreme possibilities that consensus may exclude or downplay… given the anchoring that
inevitably occurs around numerical values, the basis for quantitative uncertainty estimates provided must be
broadened to give observational, paleoclimatic, or theoretical evidence of poorly understood phenomena comparable
weight with evidence from numerical modeling… One possible improvement would be for the IPCC to fully include
judgments from expert elicitations.
39
Glaciologist Prof. Eric Rignot, says that “One of the problems of IPCC is the strong desire to rely on physical models."   He
40
explains:
For instance, in terms of sea-level rise projection, the IPCC tends downplay the importance of semi-empirical
models. In the case of Antarctica, it may be another ten years before fully-coupled ice sheet–ocean–sea
ice–atmosphere models get the southern hemisphere atmospheric circulation right, the Southern Ocean right, and
the ice sheet right using physical models, with the full physics, at a high spatial resolution. In the meantime, it is
essential to move forward our scientific understanding and inform the public and policy makers based on
observations, basic physics, simpler models, well before the full-fledged physical models eventually get there.
38 Campbell et al., op cit.
39 Oppenheimer, M, O’Neill, B, Webster, M & Agrawala, S 2007, ‘The Limits of Consensus’, Science,


vol. 317, pp. 1505-1506.
40 Rignot, E, pers. comm., 8 August 2017.
WHAT LIES BENEATH  10 

It is important to understand the distinction between full climate models and the semi-empirical approach, because IPCC
reports appear to privilege the former at the expense of the latter. Sea-level rise projections are a good example of this.
●Full coupled GCMs (global climate models or general circulation models) are mathematical representations
of the Earth’s climate system, based on the laws of physics and chemistry. Run on computers, they simulate the
interactions of the important drivers of climate, including atmosphere–oceans–land surface–ice interactions, to
solve the full equations for mass and energy transfer and radiant exchange. Models are tested in the first instance
by hindsight: how well, once loaded with the observed climate conditions (parameters) at a time in the past, do
they reproduce what has happened since that point. They are limited by the capacity of modellers to understand
the physical processes involved, so as to be able to represent them in quantitative terms. For example, ice sheet
dynamics are poorly reproduced, and therefore key processes that control the response of ice flow to a warming
climate are not included in current ice sheet models. GCMs are being improved over time, and new higher-capacity
computers allow models of finer resolution to be developed.
41
●A semi-empirical model is a simpler, physically plausible model of reduced complexity that exploits statistical
relationships. It combines current observations with some basic physical relationships observed from past climates,
and theoretical considerations relating variables through fundamental principles, to project future climate
conditions. For example, semi-empirical models “can provide a pragmatic alternative to estimate the sea-level
response”.  Observing past rates of sea-level change from the climate record when the forcing (energy imbalance
42
in the system) was similar to today, gives insights into how quickly sea levels may rise in the next period. Thus a
semi-empirical approach to projecting future sea-level rise may relate the global sea-level rise to global mean
surface temperature.This approach was used by Rahmstorf in 2007, to project a 0.5–1.4 metres sea-level rise by
2100, compared to the IPCC’s 2007 report, based on GCMs, which gave  a figure of 0.18–0.59 metre based on
GCM results.
43
Semi-empirical models rely on observations from climate history (paleoclimatology) to establish relationships between
variables. In privileging GCMs over semi-empirical models, the IPCC downplays insights from paleoclimate research.
TIPPING POINTS
A tipping point may be understood as the passing of a critical threshold in an Earth–climate system component — such as
major ocean and atmospheric circulation patterns, the polar ice sheets, and the terrestrial and ocean carbon stores — which
produces a step change in the system. In some cases, passing one threshold will trigger further threshold events, for
example where substantial greenhouse gas releases from permafrost carbon stores increase warming, releasing even more
permafrost carbon in a positive feedback, but also pushing other systems, such as polar ice sheets, past a threshold point.
Progress toward a tipping point is often driven by positive feedbacks, in which a change in a component leads to other
changes that eventually “feed back” onto the original component to amplify the change.  A classic case in global warming is
41 Rahmstorf, S 2007, ‘A semi-empirical approach to projecting future sea-level rise, Science

 vol. 315, pp. 368-370.
42 Ibid.
43 Ibid.
WHAT LIES BENEATH  11 

the ice–albedo feedback, where decreases in the ice cover area change surface reflectivity, trapping more heat and
producing further ice loss.
In a period of rapid warming, most major tipping points once crossed are irreversible in human time frames, principally due
to the longevity of atmospheric CO2 (a thousand years).  It is crucial that we understand as much as possible about
44
near-term tipping points for this reason.
Large-scale human interventions in slow-moving earth system tipping points might allow a tipping point to be reversed; for
example, by a large-scale atmospheric CO2 drawdown program, or solar radiation management.
The scientific literature on tipping points is relatively recent. Our knowledge is limited because a system-level understanding
of critical processes and feedbacks is still lacking in key Earth climate components, such as the polar regions, and “no
serious efforts have been made so far to identify and qualify the interactions between various tipping points”.
45
Climate models are not yet good at dealing with tipping points. This is partly due to the nature of tipping points, where a
particular and complex confluence of factors abruptly change a climate system characteristic and drive it to a different state.
To model this, all the contributing factors and their forces have to well identified, as well as their particular interactions, plus
the interactions between tipping points. Researchers say that “complex, nonlinear systems typically shift between
alternative states in an abrupt, rather than a smooth manner, which is a challenge that climate models have not yet been
able to adequately meet”.
46
The IPCC has made no projections regarding tipping-point thresholds, nor emphasised the importance of building robust
risk-management assessments of them in the absence of quantitative data.

CLIMATE SENSITIVITY
The question of climate sensitivity is a vexed one. Climate sensitivity is the amount by which the global average
temperature will rise due to a doubling of the atmospheric greenhouse gas level, at equilibrium. (Equilibrium refers to the
state of a system when all the perturbations have been resolved and the system is in balance.)
IPCC reports have focused on what is often called Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS).   The 2007 IPCC report gives a
best estimate of climate sensitivity of 3°C and says it "is likely to be in the range 2°C to 4.5°C". The 2014 report says: "no
best estimate for equilibrium climate sensitivity can now be given because of a lack of agreement on values across
assessed lines of evidence and studies" and only gives a range of 1.5°C to 4.5°C. This was a backward step.
What the IPCC reports fail to make clear is that the ECS measure omits key "long-term" carbon-cycle feedbacks that a
significant rise in the planet's temperature will trigger, such as the permafrost feedback and other changes in the terrestrial
carbon cycle, or a decrease in the ocean's carbon-sink efficiency.
44 Solomon, S, Plattner, GK, Knutti, R & Friedlingstein, P 2008, ’Irreversible climate change due to carbon dioxide emissions’, Proceedings
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45 Schellnhuber, J 2009, ‘Tipping elements in the Earth system’, Proceedings
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46 Duarte, C, Lenton, T, Wadhams, P & Wassmann, P 2012, ‘Abrupt climate change in the Arctic, Nature
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WHAT LIES BENEATH  12 

Climate sensitivity which includes these feedbacks  — known as Earth System Sensitivity (ESS)  — appears not to be
acknowledged in the 2014 IPCC reports at all. Yet, there is a wide range of literature which suggest an ESS of 4-6°C.
47
It is conventionally considered that these "long-term" feedbacks –– such as changes in the polar carbon stores and the
polar ice sheets –– operate on millennial timescales. Yet the rate at which human activity is changing the Earth’s energy
balance is without precedent in the last 66 million years and about ten times faster than during the Paleocene–Eocene
Thermal Maximum, a period with one of the largest extinction events on record. The rate of change in energy forcing is now
so great that these “long-term” feedbacks have already begun to operate within short time frames. The IPCC is not
forthcoming on this issue.  Instead it sidesteps with statements (from 2007) such as this: "Models used to date do not
include uncertainties in climate–carbon cycle feedback... because a basis in published literature is lacking... Climate–carbon
cycle coupling is expected to add CO2 to the atmosphere as the climate system warms, but the magnitude of this feedback
is uncertain".  This is the type of indefinite language that politicians and the media are likely to gloss over, in favour of a
headline number.
It should be noted that carbon budgets — the amount of carbon that could be emitted before a temperature target is
exceeded — are generally based on a climate sensitivity mid-range value around 3°C. Yet this figure may be too low.
Fasullo and Trenberth found that the climate models that most accurately capture observed relative humidity in the tropics
and subtropics and associated clouds were among those with a higher sensitivity of around 4°C. Sherwood et al. also found
a sensitivity figure of greater than 3°C. And Zhai et al. found that seven models that are consistent with the observed
seasonal variation of low-altitude marine clouds yield an ensemble-mean sensitivity of 3.9°C.
48
In research published in late 2016, Friedrich et al. show that climate models may be underestimating climate sensitivity
because it is not uniform across different circumstances, but in fact higher in warmer, interglacial periods (such as the
present) and lower in colder, glacial periods.  Based on a study of glacial cycles and temperatures over the last 800,000
49
years, the authors conclude that in warmer periods climate sensitivity averages around 4.88°C. The higher figure would
mean warming for 450 parts per million of atmospheric CO2 (a figure on current trends we will reach within 25 years) would
be around 3°C, rather than the 2°C bandied around in policy-making circles. Professor Michael Mann, of Penn State
University, says the paper appears "sound and the conclusions quite defensible".
50
47 The Geological Society 2013, An
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
addendum
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
to


the


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

on


Climate


Change:


Evidence
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the
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Final.pdf>; Hansen, J, Sato, M, Russell, G & Kharecha, P 2013, ’Climate sensitivity, sea level and atmospheric carbon dioxide’,
Philosophical
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48 Fasullo, J & Trenberth, K 2012, ’A less cloudy future: the role of subtropical subsidence in climate sensitivity’, Science,
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 vol. 338, no. 6108,
pp. 792-794; Sherwood, S, Bony, S & Dufresne, JL 2014, ’Spread in model climate sensitivity traced to atmospheric convective mixing’,
Nature,


vol. 505, pp. 37-42; Zhai, C, Jiang, J & Su, H 2015, ’Long-term cloud change imprinted in seasonal cloud variation: More evidence
of high climate sensitivity’, Geophysical


Research


Letters

, vol. 42, no. 20, pp. 8729-8737.
49 Friedrich, T, Timmermann, A, Timm, OE & Ganopolski, A 2016, ‘Nonlinear climate sensitivity and its implications for future greenhouse
warming’, Science


Advances

, vol. 2, no. 11, e1501923.
50 Johnston, I 2016, ‘Climate change may be escalating so fast it could be 'game over', scientists warn’, Independent

, 9 November 2016,
<http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/climate-change-game-over-global-warming-climate-sensitivity-seven-degrees-a7407881.htm.
>.
WHAT LIES BENEATH  13 

PERMAFROST
Related to the issue of climate sensitivity is the question of the stability of permafrost (frozen carbon stores on land and
under seabed). Scientists estimate that the world’s permafrost holds 1.5 trillion tons of frozen carbon, more than twice the
amount of carbon in the atmosphere. The Arctic is warming faster than anywhere else on earth, and researchers are seeing
soil temperatures climb rapidly. Some permafrost degradation is already occurring. Large-scale tundra wildfires in 2012
added to the concern, as have localised methane outbursts.
The 2007 IPCC assessment on permafrost did not venture beyond saying: "Changes in snow, ice and frozen ground have
with high confidence increased the number and size of glacial lakes, increased ground instability in mountain and other
permafrost regions and led to changes in some Arctic and Antarctic ecosystems." It reported with “high confidence” that
“methane emissions from tundra… and permafrost have accelerated in the past two decades, and are likely to accelerate
further”.  However, the report offered no projections regarding permafrost melt.
The 2014 SPM

 said: "It is virtually certain that near-surface permafrost extent at high northern latitudes will be reduced as
global mean surface temperature increases, with the area of permafrost near the surface (upper 3.5 m) projected to
decrease by 37% (RCP2.6) to 81% (RCP8.5) for the multi-model average (medium confidence)."  That was it. (RCPs are
representative concentration pathways of greenhouse gas emission trajectories. RCP2.6 is the lowest and RCP8.5 is the
highest.)
The effect of the permafrost carbon feedback on climate has not been included in the IPCC assessment emission
scenarios, including the 2014 report.  This is despite clear evidence that “the permafrost carbon feedback will change the
51
Arctic from a carbon sink to a source after the mid-2020s and is strong enough to cancel 42–88% of the total global land
sink”. As far back as 2005, a major study found that if we stabilize CO2 concentrations in the air at 550 ppm, permafrost
would plummet from over 4 million square miles today to 1.5 million square miles. In 2012, researchers found that for the
2100 median forecasts, there would be 0.23–0.27°C of extra warming due to permafrost feedbacks. Some scientists
consider that 1.5°C appears to be something of a "tipping point” for extensive permafrost thaw.
52
A 2014 study made use of projections from the most recent IPCC report to estimate that up to 205 gigatons equivalent of
CO2 could be released due to melting permafrost. This would cause up to 0.5°C extra warming for the high emissions
scenario, and up to 0.15°C of extra warming for a 2°C scenario.  The authors say that: “Climate projections in the IPCC
Fifth


Assessment


Report

, and any emissions targets based on those projections, do not adequately account for emissions
from thawing permafrost and the effects of the permafrost carbon feedback on global climate.”
53
Recently attention has turned to the question of the stability of large methane hydrate stores below the ocean floor on the
shallow East Siberian Arctic Shelf (ESAS). (Methane hydrates are a cage-like lattice of ice inside of which are trapped
methane molecules.)
51 UNEP 2012, Policy


Implications


of


Warming


Permafrost

, United Nations Environment Program, Nairobi,
<http://wedocs.unep.org/handle/20.500.11822/8533>.
52 MacDougall, A, Avis, C & Weaver, AJ 2012, ’Significant contribution to climate warming from the permafrost carbon feedback’, Nature
Geoscience,

 vol. 5, pp. 719–721; Schaefer, K, Zhang, T, Bruhwiler & Barrett, A 2011, ‘Amount and timing of permafrost carbon release in
response to climate warming’, Tellus


B,

 vol. 63, no. 2, pp. 165-180; Vaks, A, Gutareva, OS, Breitenbach, SF, Avirmed, E, Mason, AJ,
Thomas, AL, Osinzev, AV & Henderson, GM 2013, ‘Speleothems reveal 500,000-year history of Siberian permafrost’, Science,

 vol. 340, no.
6129, pp. 183-186.
53 Schaefer, K, Lanuit, H, Romanovsky, V, Schuur, E & Witt, R 2014, ‘The impact of the permafrost carbon feedback on global climate’,
Environmental
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
Research
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Letters,


vol. 9, no. 8, 085003.
WHAT LIES BENEATH  14 

These stores are protected from the warmer ocean temperatures above by a layer of frozen sub-sea permafrost. The
concern is that warmer water could create taliks (areas of unfrozen permafrost) through which massive methane emissions
from the hydrates could escape into the water column above, and into the atmosphere. This possibility was raised in 2013
by Whiteman, Hope and Wadhams, who said that the release of a single giant “pulse” of methane from thawing Arctic
permafrost beneath the East Siberian Sea could come with a $60 trillion global price tag.
54
Wadhams explained that “the loss of sea ice leads to seabed warming, which leads to offshore permafrost melt , which
leads to methane release, which leads to enhanced warming, which leads to even more rapid uncovering of seabed”, and
this is not “a low probability event”.
55
More than a few experts derided these claims. The model estimates reported by the IPCC are that the degradation of ESAS
permafrost cannot exceed several metres this century, and the formation of taliks that would allow the release of large
amounts of methane will take hundreds or thousands of years. Thus the IPCC considers the potential contribution of the
ESAS into the emissions of methane as insignificant.
56
But researchers say that model is no longer correct. In August 2017, they announced that:
New data obtained by complex biochemical, geophysical and geological studies conducted in 2011-2016 resulted
in the conclusion that in some areas of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf the roof of the subsea permafrost had already
reached the depth of hydrates' stability the destruction of which may cause massive releases of bubble methane…
The results of our study ensure fundamentally new insights of the mechanism of processes responsible for the
state of subsea permafrost in the East Siberian Arctic Shelf which, according to various estimates, concentrates up
to 80% and more of entire subsea permafrost in the Northern Hemisphere, under which there are huge
hydrocarbon reserves in the forms of hydrates, oil and free gas.
57
A deceptively optimistic picture is painted when the potential impacts from the degradation of permafrost and methane
hydrates are underplayed.
CARBON BUDGETS
A carbon budget is an estimate of total allowable fossil fuel use, in tons of carbon or CO2, that would limit warming to a
specified figure, such as 1.5°C or 2°C, with a given risk of over-shooting the target, such as a 50%, 33% or 10% risk.
The discussion of carbon budgets is frequently opaque. Often, it is difficult to ascertain whether the assumptions are
realistic, for example whether a budget includes non-CO2 forcings such as methane and nitrous oxide. Too often, the risk of
failure is not clearly spelt out, especially "fat tail" risks. Contrary to the tone of the IPCC reports, the evidence shows we
have no carbon budget for 2°C for a sensible risk-management, low-risk probability (of a 10%, or one-in-ten chance) of
exceeding that target. The IPCC reports fail to say there is no carbon budget if 2°C is considered a cap (an upper boundary
54  Whiteman, G, Hope, C & Wadhams, P 2013, ‘Climate science: Vast costs of Arctic change”, Nature,

 vol. 499, pp. 401–403.
55 Ahmed, N 2013, ‘Ice-free Arctic in two years heralds methane catastrophe – scientist’, The


Guardian

, 25 July 2103,
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/jul/24/arctic-ice-free-methane-economy-catastrophe
56 Tomsk Polytechnic University 2017, Russian scientists deny climate model of IPCC’, Eureka


Alert

, 15 August 2017,
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-08/tpu-rsd081517.php
57 ibid.
WHAT LIES BENEATH  15 

not to be exceeded) as per the Copenhagen Accord, rather than a target (an aspiration which can be significantly
exceeded). The IPCC reports fail to say that once likely emissions resulting from future food production and deforestation
are taken into account, there is no carbon budget for fossil fuel emissions for a 2°C target,.
58
Carbon budgets are routinely proposed that have a substantial and unacceptable risk of exceeding specified targets and
hence entail large and unmanageable risks of failure.
ARCTIC SEA ICE
In 2007, the IPCC reported: "Satellite data since 1978 show that annual average Arctic sea ice extent has shrunk by 2.7%
per decade" and "late summer sea-ice is projected to disappear almost completely towards the end of the twenty-first
century".
That same year, the summer retreat of Arctic sea-ice wildly out-distanced all 18 IPCC computer models. One scientist
exclaimed that is was melting "one hundred years ahead of schedule". Many models, including those on which the 2007
IPCC report had relied, did not fully capture the dynamics of sea-ice loss. Prof. Michael E. Mann says sea-ice modellers had
“speculated that the 2007 minimum was an aberration… a matter of random variability, noise in the system, that sea ice
would recover.… That no longer looks tenable.”
59
Yet, two years earlier, Prof. Tore Furevik of the Geophysical Institute in Bergen had already demonstrated that actual Arctic
sea-ice retreat had been greater than estimates in any of the Arctic models reported by the IPCC.  By 2007, a wider range
of scientists had presented evidence that the Arctic may be free of all summer sea-ice as early as 2030.  Of this, the 2007
60
IPCC report said nothing.
There was a similar, mind-numbing drop in Arctic sea-ice extent again in the summer of 2012, again far in advance of the
models. By 2012, the summer minimum sea-ice volume was one-third of that just 30 years earlier.
Yet, in an astonishing understatement, the 2014 IPCC report said: "Year-round reductions in Arctic sea ice are projected for
all RCP scenarios." It said a nearly ice-free Arctic Ocean in the summer was likely for the highest emissions scenario only.
In reality, summer ice is thinning faster than every climate projection, tipping points had been crossed for sea-ice-free
summer conditions, and today scientists say an ice-free summer Arctic could be just years away, not many decades.
Model limitations “are hindering our ability to predict the future state of Arctic sea ice” and the majority of general climate
models “have not been able to adequately reproduce observed multi-decadal sea-ice variability and trends in the pan-Arctic
58 Raupach, M 2013, pers. comm, 20 October 2013, based on Raupach, M, Harman, IN & Canadell, GJ 2011, Global


climate


goals


for
temperature,


concentrations,


emissions


and


cumulative


emissions

, The Centre For Australian Weather and Climate Research, Melbourne
2011, discussed at http://www.climatecodered.org/2014/05/thereal-budgetary-emergency-burnable.html; Arora, VK, Scinocca, JF, Boer, GJ,
Christian, RJ, Denman, KL, Flato, GM, Kharin, VV, Lee, WG & Merryfield, WJ 2015, ‘Carbon emission limits required to satisfy future
representative concentration pathways of greenhouse gases’, Geophysical


Research


Letters

, vol. 38, L05805; Meinshausen, M 2008, ‘The
EU, the IPCC and the science of climate change: The 2°C target’, IES Autumn lecture series, 8 October 2008, Brussels; Anderson, K & and
Bows, A 2008, ‘Reframing the climate change challenge in light of post-2000 emission trends, Philosophical


Transactions


of


the


Royal
Society


A

, vol. 366, pp. 3863-3882.
59 Scherer 2012a, op. cit.
60 Serreze, MC, Holland, MM & Stroeve, J 2007, ‘Perspectives on the Arctic’s shrinking sea ice cover’, Science

, vol. 315, no. 5818, pp.
1533-1536; Stroeve, J, Holland, MM, Meier, W, Scambos, T & Serreze, M  2007, ‘Arctic sea ice decline: Faster than forecast?’,
Geophysical


Research


Letters

 vol. 34, no. 9, L09501.
WHAT LIES BENEATH  16 

region”, so their ensemble mean trend in September Arctic sea-ice extent “is approximately 30 years behind the observed
trend”.
61
Because climate models are missing key real-world interactions and generally have been poor at dealing with Arctic sea-ice
retreat, expert elicitations play a key role in considering whether the Arctic has passed a very significant and “dangerous”
tipping point.  But the IPCC has not done this.
62
POLAR ICE-MASS LOSS
In 1995, the IPCC projected "little change in the extent of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets… over the next 50-100
years". The 2001 IPCC report suggested that neither the Greenland nor the Antarctic ice sheets would lose significant mass
by 2100.
The 2007 IPCC report said there were "uncertainties … in the full effects of changes in ice sheet flow", and a suggestion
that "partial loss of ice sheets on polar land could imply metres of sea-level rise … Such changes are projected to occur
over millennial time scales". The reality is very different.
GREENLAND ICE SHEET
In 2007, the IPCC reported: "Contraction of the Greenland ice sheet is projected to continue to contribute to sea-level rise
after 2100. Current models suggest virtually complete elimination of the Greenland ice sheet and a resulting contribution to
sea-level rise of about 7 metres if global average warming were sustained for millennia in excess of 1.9 to 4.6°C relative to
pre-industrial values.
This was despite two 2006 studies which found that the Greenland ice cap "may be melting three times faster than indicated
by previous measurements", warnings that "‘we are close to being committed to a collapse of the Greenland ice sheet" and
reports that rising Arctic regional temperatures are already at "the threshold beyond which glaciologists think the
[Greenland] ice sheet may be doomed".
63
The 2007 assessment "did not take into account the potential melting of Greenland, which I think was a mistake," said
Robert Watson, Chief Scientific Advisor for Britain's Department for Environmental Affairs and chairman of the IPCC's 2001
assessment.
64
By 2014, the IPCC was reporting that "over the period 1992 to 2011, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have been
losing mass, likely at a larger rate over 2002 to 2011", the loss of the Greenland ice sheet would be a period “over a
61 Maslowski, W, Kinney, JC, Higgins, M & Roberts, A 2012, ‘The future of Arctic sea ice’, The


Annual


Review


of


Earth


and


Planetary
Sciences

, vol. 20, pp. 625-654.
62 Livina, VN & Lenton, TM 2013, ‘A recent tipping point in the Arctic sea-ice cover: abrupt and persistent increase in the seasonal cycle
since 2007’, The


Cryosphere,

 vol. 7, pp. 275-286; Maslowski, Kinney et al 2012., op. cit.
63 Rignot, E & Kanagaratnam, P 2006, ‘Changes in the velocity structure of the Greenland ice sheet’,


Science

, vol. 311, no. 5763, pp.
986-90; Chen, JL, Wilson, CR & Tapley, BD 2006, ‘Satellite gravity measurements confirm accelerated melting of Greenland ice’, Science

,
vol. 313, pp. 1958–60; Young, K 2006, “Greenland ice cap may be melting at triple speed”, New


Scientist

, 10 August,
<https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn9717-greenland-ice-cap-may-be-melting-at-triple-speed>.
64 AFP 2008, ‘Climate change gathers steam, say scientists’, Space


Daily

, 30 November 2008,
<http://www.spacedaily.com/2006/081130055637.szeh21pj.html>.
WHAT LIES BENEATH  17 

millennium or more”, with a threshold between 1°C and 4°C of warming. In fact, the annual rate of loss had doubled in the
period 2003 to 2010 compared with the rate throughout the 20th century.
65
By this time, many leading cryosphere scientists were saying informally that Greenland had passed its tipping point, "is
already lost", and similar sentiments. And a year before, a significant research paper had estimated the tipping point for
Greenland Ice Sheet as 1.6°C (with an uncertainty range of 0.8 to 3.2°C).  And there was clear satellite evidence of
accelerating ice mass loss.
66
Current-generation climate models are not yet all that helpful for predicting Greenland ice-mass loss. They have a poor
understanding of the processes involved, and the acceleration, retreat and thinning of outlet glaciers are poorly or not
represented.
67
In the case of Greenland, the adverse consequences for policymaking of the IPCC's method of privileging global climate
model results over observations, historical data and expert elicitations can be clearly seen. It is hard to imagine how the rate
of Greenland ice sheet deglaciation can other than continue to accelerate as the climate continues to warm, reflectivity
declines, and late summer ocean conditions become sea-ice-free. In 2012, then NASA climate science chief James Hansen
told Bloomberg that: “Our greatest concern is that loss of Arctic sea ice creates a grave threat of passing two other tipping
points – the potential instability of the Greenland ice sheet and methane hydrates… These latter two tipping points would
have consequences that are practically irreversible on time scales of relevance to humanity.”  On this very grave threat, the
68
IPCC is mute.
ANTARCTIC ICE SHEET
The 2007 IPCC assessment proffered: "Current global model studies project that the Antarctic ice sheet will remain too cold
for widespread surface melting and gain mass due to increased snowfall. However, net loss of ice mass could occur if
dynamical ice discharge dominates the ice sheet mass balance". Reality and new research would soon undermine this
one-sided reliance by the IPCC on models with poor cryosphere performance.
By the 2014 IPCC assessment, the story was: "Based on current understanding (from observations, physical understanding
and modelling), only the collapse of marine-based sectors of the Antarctic ice sheet, if initiated, could cause global mean
sea level to rise substantially above the likely range during the 21st century. There is medium confidence that this additional
contribution would not exceed several tenths of a meter of sea-level rise during the 21st century."  And: "Abrupt and
irreversible ice loss from the Antarctic ice sheet is possible, but current evidence and understanding is insufficient to make a
quantitative assessment." This was another blunder.
Observations of accelerating ice mass loss in West Antarctica were well established by this time.
69
65 Mooney, C, 2015, ‘Greenland has lost a staggering amount of ice — and it’s only getting worse’, Washington


Post

, 16 December 2015,
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/12/16/greenland-has-lost-a-staggering-amount-of-ice-and-its-only-ge
tting-worse>.
66 Robinson, A, Calov, R & Ganopolski, A 2012, ‘Multistability and critical thresholds of the Greenland ice sheet’, Nature


Climate


Change,
vol. 2, pp. 429–432.
67 Maslowski, Kinney et al. 2012, op cit.
68 Bloomberg, 2012, ‘Arctic sea ice heads for record low’, Bloomberg,

 17 August 2012,
<http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-17/arctic-sea-ice-heads-for-record-low-as-melt-exceeds-forecasts.html>.
69 Velicogna, I 2009, ‘Increasing rates of ice mass loss from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets revealed by GRACE’, Geophysical
Research


Letters

, vol. 36, L19503.
WHAT LIES BENEATH  18 

It is likely that the Amundsen Sea sector of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has already been destabilized, ice retreat is
unstoppable for the current conditions, and no acceleration in climate change is necessary to trigger the collapse of the rest
of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, with loss of a significant fraction on a decadal-to-century time scale.  One of most
significant research findings in 2014 was that the “tipping point’ has already passed for one of these “long-term” events.
Scientists found that "the retreat of ice in the Amundsen Sea sector of West Antarctica was unstoppable, with major
consequences – it will mean that sea levels will rise 1 metre worldwide… Its disappearance will likely trigger the collapse of
the rest of the West Antarctic ice sheet, which comes with a sea-level rise of between 3–5 metres. Such an event will
displace millions of people worldwide.”
70
This was a world away from the IPCC report of the same year.
In 2016, another significant study concluded that “Antarctica has the potential to contribute more than a metre of sea-level
rise by 2100 and more than 15 metres by 2500”.  Compare this to the IPCC report just a year earlier that Antarctica’s
71
contribution to rising sea levels would “not exceed several tenths of a meter… during the 21st century”.
As well, partial deglaciation of the East Antarctic ice sheet is likely for the current level of atmospheric CO2, contributing 10
metres or more of sea-level rise in the longer run, and 5 metres in the first 200 years.
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SEA-LEVEL RISE
The fate of the world's coastlines has become a classic example of how the IPCC, when confronted with conflicting science,
tends to go for the “least drama” position.
In the 2001 assessment report, the IPCC projected a sea rise of 2 mm per year.  By 2007, the researchers found that the
range of 2001 predictions were lower than the actual rise. Satellite data showed that levels had risen by an average of 3.3
millimetres per year between 1993 and 2006.
The worst-case scenario in the 2007 report, which looked mostly at thermal expansion of the oceans as temperatures
warmed, projected up to 0.59 metre of sea-level-rise by century's end. In an extraordinary verbal contortion, it then said it
did "not assess the likelihood, nor provide a best estimate or an upper bound for sea-level rise… The projections do not
include uncertainties in climate–carbon cycle feedbacks nor the full effects of changes in ice sheet flow, therefore the upper
values of the ranges are not to be considered upper bounds for sea-level rise. They include a contribution from increased
Greenland and Antarctic ice flow at the rates observed for 1993-2003, but this could increase or decrease in the future".
Yet, in early 2007, Rahmstorf had presented a "semi-empirical relation… that connects global sea-level rise to global mean
surface temperature" which resulted  "in a projected sea-level rise in 2100 of 0.5 to 1.4 meters above the 1990 level".
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70 Rignot, E, Mouginot, J, Morlighem, M, Seroussi, H & Scheuchl, B 2014, ‘Widespread, rapid grounding line retreat of Pine Island,
Thwaites, Smith, and Kohler glaciers, West Antarctica, from 1992 to 2011’, Geophysical


Research


Letters

, vol. 41, pp. 3502–3509.
71 DeConto, R & Pollard, D 2016, ‘Contribution of Antarctica to past and future sea-level rise’, Nature,

 vol. 531, pp. 591–597.
72 Pollard, D, DeConto, R & Alley, R 2015, ‘Potential Antarctic Ice Sheet retreat driven by hydrofracturing and ice cliff failure’, Earth
Planetary


Science


Letters

, vol. 412, pp. 112– 121.
73 Rahmstorf 2007, op cit.
WHAT LIES BENEATH  19 

Many climate scientists received the 2007 IPCC report’s suggestion of a sea-level rise of 18–59 centimetres by 2100 with
dismay, because it seriously underestimated the problem. Even before the 2007 report appeared, Hansen warned of a
"scientific reticence" which "in a case such as ice sheet instability and sea-level rise (results in) a danger in excessive
caution.  We may rue reticence, if it serves to lock in future disasters."
74
Figure 2: Observed sea-level rise 1970-2010 from tide gauge data (red) and satellite measurements (blue) compared to model projections for
1990-2010 from the IPCC Third Assessment Report (grey band).  (Source: The


Copenhagen


Diagnosis

, 2009)
By 2009, various studies offered drastically higher projections than the IPCC. Australian Government reports noted: "Recent
research, presented at the Copenhagen Climate Congress in March 2009, projected sea-level rise from 0.75 to 1.9 m
relative to 1990, with 1.1–1.2 m the midrange of the projection”. And: "Current estimates of sea-level rise range from 0.50 m
to over 2 m by 2100.”
75
Yet extraordinarily, the 2014 IPCC assessment report repeated the mistake and actually produced a numerically smaller
figure (0.55 m as compared to 0.59 m in 2007) despite mounting evidence of polar ice-mass loss: "Global mean sea-level
rise will continue during the 21st century, very likely at a faster rate than observed from 1971 to 2010. For the period
2081–2100 relative to 1986–2005, the rise will likely be in the ranges of 0.26 to 0.55 m for RCP2.6, and of 0.45 to 0.82 m for
RCP8.5." And then, having noted estimates for sea-level rise to 2100 of between 1.15 metres and 2.4 metres, the report
said: ”Considering this inconsistent evidence, we conclude that the probability of specific levels above the likely range
cannot be reliably evaluated."  If some work could not be “reliably evaluated”, how could they be sure of the much lower
estimates which they had quantified?
This event shot down any shreds of IPCC credibility on sea-level rise that may have lingered after 2007.
An updated NOAA sea-level rise report released in early 2017 recommends a revised worst-case sea-level rise scenario of
2.5 metres by 2100, 5.5 metres by 2150 and 9.7 metres by 2200. It says sea-level science has “advanced significantly over
the last few years, especially (for) land-based ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica under global warming”, and hence the
“correspondingly larger range of possible 21st century rise in sea level than previously thought”. It points to “continued and
74 Hansen 2007, op cit.
75 Australian Government, 2009, Climate


Change


Risks


to


Australia's


Coasts:


A


first


pass


national


assessment

, Australian Government,
Canberra; CSIRO/BoM/Department of Climate Change 2009, Science


Update


2009,

 no. 2, November 2009, Australian Government,
Canberra.
WHAT LIES BENEATH  20 

growing evidence that both Antarctica and Greenland are losing mass at an accelerated rate”, which “strengthens an
argument for considering worst-case scenarios in coastal risk management”.
76
The fact of the matter is that today the discussion amongst experts is for a sea-level rise this century of at least 1 metre, and
perhaps in excess of 2 metres. The US Department of Defence uses scenarios of 1 and 2 metres for risk assessments.
Evidence (cited above) that Antarctica by itself has the potential to contribute more than a metre of sea-level rise by 2100,
and that at less than 1°C of warming, West Antarctic glaciers are in “unstoppable” meltdown for 1-4metres of sea-level rise,
only add to grave concern that the IPCC reports are simply irrelevant on this matter.
POLITICAL CONSENSUS
The IPCC and the UNFCCC are the twin climate processes of the United Nations.
Conferences of the Parties (COPs) under the UNFCCC are political fora, populated by professional representatives of
national governments, and subject to the diplomatic processes of negotiation, trade-offs and deals. In this sense, the COPs
are similar in process to that of the IPCC by which the Summary


for


Policymakers

 is agreed. The decision-making is
inclusive (by consensus), making outcomes hostage to national interests and lowest-common-denominator politics.
The COP 21 Paris


Agreement  is almost devoid of substantive language on the cause of human-induced climate change
77
and contains no reference to “coal”, “oil”, “fracking”, “shale oil”, “fossil fuel” or “carbon dioxide”, nor to the words “zero”,
“ban”, “prohibit” or “stop”. By way of comparison, the term “adaptation” occurs more than eighty times in 31 pages, though
responsibility for forcing others to adapt is not mentioned, and both liability and compensation are explicitly excluded. The
Agreement has a goal but no firm action plan, and bureaucratic jargon abounds, including the terms “enhance” and
“capacity” appearing more than fifty times each.
The proposed emission cuts by individual nations under the Paris


Agreement


are voluntary (unilateral), without an
enforceable compliance mechanism. In this sense, the Agreement

 cannot be considered “binding” on signatories. The
voluntary national emission reduction commitments are not critically analysed in the Agreement

, but noted to be inadequate
for limiting warming to 2°C.
The Paris voluntary national commitments would result in emissions in 2030 being higher than in 2015 and are consistent
with a 3°C warming path, and significantly higher if the warming impacts of carbon-cycle feedbacks are considered. Unless
dramatically improved upon, the present commitments exclude the attainment of either the 1.5°C or 2°C targets this century
without wholly unrealistic assumptions about negative emissions.
76 NOAA 2017, Global


and


regional


sea-level


rise


scenarios


for


the


United


States

, NOAA, Silver Spring MA,
<https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/publications/ techrpt83_Global_and_Regional_SLR_Scenarios_for_the_ US_final.pdf >.
77 UN 2015, Paris


Agreement

, United Nations, New York,
<http://unfccc.int/files/essential_background/convention/application/pdf/english_paris_agreement.pdf>.
WHAT LIES BENEATH  21 

GOALS ABANDONED
The UNFCCC primary goal is to “stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent
dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system".  But what is “dangerous”? Traditionally, policymakers have
78
focused on the 2°C target, but the Paris


Agreement


emphasises “holding the increase in the global average temperature to
well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C”.
With the experience of global warming impacts so far, scientists have distinguished between "dangerous" (1-2°C band) and
"extremely dangerous" (above 2°C) climate warming.
79
But we now have evidence that significant tipping points –– for example, summer sea-ice free Arctic conditions, the loss of
West Antarctic glaciers and a multi-metre sea-level rise –– have very likely been passed at less than 1°C of warming.  As
80
well, evidence is accumulating that around the current level of warming more elements of the system may be heading
towards tipping points or experiencing qualitative change. These include the slowing of the major ocean current known as
the Atlantic conveyor, likely as a result of climate change; accelerating ice-mass loss from Greenland; declining carbon
efficiency of the Amazon forests and other sinks; and the vulnerability of Arctic permafrost stores. Warming of 1.5°C would
set sea-level rises in train sufficient to challenge significant components of human civilisation, besides reducing the world’s
coral ecosystems to remnant structures.
In other words, climate change is already dangerous, but the UNFCCC processes have not acknowledged this reality,
proposing higher warming targets as policy goals. Nor has the IPCC process, with its lags in its publication process, and a
“burning embers” representation of the risks that again looks too conservative.
81
An expert panel recently concluded that warming would need to be limited to 1.2°C to save the Great Barrier Reef.  That is
82
probably too optimistic, but with a warming trend of 1.05–1.1°C and 2016 global average warming above 1.2°C, it also
demonstrates that climate change is already dangerous.
The question as to what would be safe for the protection of people and other species is not addressed by policymakers.
If climate change is already dangerous, then by setting the 1.5°C and 2°C targets, the UNFCCC process has abandoned
the goal of preventing "dangerous anthropogenic influence with the climate system”.
The UNFCCC key goals ”to ensure that food production is not threatened" and achieving "a time-frame sufficient to allow
ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change" have been discarded for all practical purposes. Food production is already
threatened by rising sea levels and inundation, shifting rainfall patterns and desertification, and extreme heatwave and
wildfire episodes. Such events became a driver of the “Arab Spring” and a threat multiplier in the Syrian conflict and in
Darfur.
83
78 UNFCCC n.d., ‘First steps to a safer future: Introducing The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’, United Nations,
<http://unfccc.int/essential_background/convention/items/6036.php>.
79 Anderson, K & Bows, A 2011 ‘Beyond ‘dangerous’ climate change: emission scenarios for a new world’, Philosophical
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Transactions
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80 Livina & Lenton 2013, op. cit.; Rignot, Mouginot et al. 2014, op. cit.; DeConto & Pollard 2016, op. cit.
81 O’Neill, B, Oppenheimer, M, Warren, R, Hallegatte, S, Kopp, RE, Portner, HO, Scholes, R, Birkmann, J, Foden, W, Mach, K, Marbaix, P,
Mastrandrea, M, Price, J, Takahashi, K, van Ypersele, JP & Yohe, G 2017, ‘IPCC reasons for concern regarding climate change risks’,
Nature
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Climate
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Change,
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 vol. 7, pp. 28–37.
82 Hannam, P 2017, ‘Warming limit of 1.2 degrees needed to save Great Barrier Reef: expert panel’, The
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Age
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<http://www.theage.com.au/environment/climate-change/warming-limit-of-12-degrees-needed-to-save-great-barrier-reef-expert-panel-2017
0728-gxkwph.html>.
83 Werrell, CE & Femia, F 2013, The
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
Arab


Spring


and
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Climate
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
Change
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, edn., Centre for American Progress/Stimson/The Center for Climate
and Security, Washington.
WHAT LIES BENEATH  22 

Ecosystems including coral reefs, mangroves and kelp forests in Australia are degrading fast as the world's sixth mass
extinction gathers pace. Major ecosystems are now severely degraded and climate policymakers have no realistic
agreement to save or restore them, from the Arctic to the Amazon, from the Great Barrier Reef to the Sahel.
The Paris


Agreement


recognised the “fundamental priority of safeguarding food security” (note the change from the original
goal to “ensure” food production is not threatened). The Paris


Agreement

 made no references to time-frames sufficient to
allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change, suggesting this goal has been (literally) dropped.
Because climate change is already dangerous, a reframing of the objective for international policymaking is required.

A FAILURE OF IMAGINATION
“Political reality must be grounded in physical reality or it’s completely useless.”
— Prof. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute
84
At the London School of Economics in 2008, Queen Elizabeth questioned: “Why did no one foresee the timing, extent and
severity of the Global Financial Crisis?” The British Academy answered a year later: “A psychology of denial gripped the
financial and corporate world… [it was] the failure of the collective imagination of many bright people… to understand the
risks to the system as a whole.”
85
A “failure of imagination” has also been identified as one of the reasons for the breakdown in US intelligence around the
9/11 attacks in 2001.
A similar failure is occurring in our understanding of and response to climate change today.
The problem is widespread at senior levels of government and global corporations. A 2016 report, Thinking


the


unthinkable

,
based on interviews with top leaders around the world, found that: “A proliferation of ‘unthinkable’ events… has revealed a
new fragility at the highest levels of corporate and public service leaderships. Their ability to spot, identify and handle
unexpected, non-normative events is… perilously inadequate at critical moments… Remarkably, there remains a deep
reluctance, or what might be called ‘executive myopia’, to see and contemplate even the possibility that ‘unthinkables’ might
happen, let alone how to handle them.”
86
Such failures are manifested in two ways in climate policy. At the political, bureaucratic and business levels in the
underplaying of the high-end risks and in failing to recognise that the existential risks of climate change is totally different
from other risk categories. And at the research level, as embodied in IPCC reports, in underestimating climate change
impacts, along with an under-emphasis on, and poor communication of, the high-end risks. The IPCC reports have not
provided a sufficient evidentiary base to answer a key question for normative policymaking: what would be safe? As noted
previously, IPCC processes paid little attention to less than 2°C scenarios until prompted to do so by the political sector.
84 Leahy, S 2009, ‘Climate Change: Four degrees of devastation’, Inter


Press


Service

, 9 October 2009,
<http://www.ipsnews.net/2009/10/climate-change-four-degrees-of-devastation/>.
85 Stewart, H 2009, ‘This is how we let the credit crunch happen, Ma'am …’, The


Guardian

, 26 July,
<https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/jul/26/monarchy-credit-crunch>.
86 Gowing, N & Langdon, C 2016, Thinking


the

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Unthinkable:


A
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
new


imperative


for


leadership


in


the


digital


age

, Chartered Institute of
Management Accountants, London.
WHAT LIES BENEATH  23 

Climate policymaking at all levels of government use the reports of the IPCC as the primary physical science basis. The
failure of the IPCC to report in a balanced manner the full range of risks and to fully account for high-end outcomes leaves
policymakers ill-informed and undermines the capacity of governments and communities to make the correct decisions to
protect their well-being, or indeed to protect human civilisation as a whole, in the face of existential risks.
A reframing of the scientific research within an existential risk-management framework is now urgently required, if
policymaking is to be soundly based.
WHAT LIES BENEATH  24 

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