'Gap' in carbon removal: Countries' plans to remove CO2 not enough

New research involving the University of East Anglia (UEA) suggests that countries' current plans to remove CO2 from the atmosphere will not be enough to comply with the 1.5 ºC warming limit set out under the Paris Agreement.

Since 2010, the United Nations environmental organisation UNEP has taken an annual measurement of the emissions gap -- the difference between countries' climate protection pledges and what is necessary to limit global heating to 1.5 ºC, or at least below 2 ºC.

The UNEP Emissions Gap Reports are clear: climate policy needs more ambition. This new study now explicitly applies this analytical concept to carbon dioxide removal (CDR) -- the removal of the most important greenhouse gas, CO2, from the atmosphere.

The study, published today in the journal Nature Climate Change, was led by the Berlin-based Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC) and involved an international team of scientists.

"In the Emissions Gap Reports, carbon removals are only accounted for indirectly," said lead author Dr William Lamb, of the MCC Applied Sustainability Science working group.

"After all, the usual benchmark for climate protection pledges is net emissions, ie emissions minus removals. We are now making transparent the specific ambition gap in scaling up removals.

"This planetary waste management will soon place completely new requirements on policymakers and may even become a central pillar of climate protection in the second half of the century."

Co-author Dr Naomi Vaughan, of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at UEA, added: "Carbon dioxide removal methods have a small but vital role to play in achieving net zero and limiting the impacts of climate change.

"Our analysis shows that countries need more awareness, ambition and action on scaling up CDR methods together with deep emissions reductions to achieve the aspirations of the Paris Agreement."

According to the study, if national targets are fully implemented, annual human-induced carbon removals could increase by a maximum of 0.5 gigatonnes of CO2 (500 million tonnes) by 2030, and by a maximum of 1.9 gigatonnes by 2050.

This contrasts with the 5.1 gigatonne increase required in a 'focus scenario', which the research team depicts as typical from the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment report.

There, global heating, calculated over the entire course of this century, is limited to 1.5 ºC, and a particularly rapid expansion of renewable energies and reduction of fossil emissions is depicted as the core climate protection strategy.

But, the focus scenario still relies on scaling up carbon removals. The gap for the year 2050 is therefore at least 3.2 gigatonnes of CO2 (5.1 minus a maximum of 1.9).

An alternative focus scenario, also derived from the IPCC, assumes a significant reduction in global energy demand, due to politically initiated behaviour changes as the core element of climate protection strategy.

Here, carbon removals would increase by a more modest amount: 2.5 gigatonnes in 2050. Fully implemented national targets would be close to sufficient when compared to this scenario, with a gap in 2050 of 0.4 gigatonnes.

The research team points out the problem of sustainability limits in scaling up carbon removals; for example, the associated land area demand will come to jeopardise biodiversity and food security. Nevertheless, there is still plenty of room for designing fair and sustainable land management policies.

In addition, novel carbon removal options, such as air filter systems, or 'enhanced rock weathering', have hardly been promoted by politicians to date.

They currently only remove 0.002 gigatonnes of CO2 per year from the atmosphere, compared to 3 gigatonnes through conventional options such as afforestation, and they are unlikely to significantly increase by 2030. According to the scenarios, they must become more prevalent than conventional options by 2010.

Since only 40 countries have so far quantified their removal plans in their long-term low emissions development strategies, the study also draws on other national documents and best-guess assumptions.

"The calculation should certainly be refined," said Dr Lamb. "But our proposal using the focus scenarios further opens the discourse on how much carbon removal is necessary to meet the Paris Agreement.

"This much is clear: without a rapid reduction in emissions towards zero, across all sectors, the 1.5 ºC limit will not be met under any circumstances."

Read more at Science Daily

Why are people climate change deniers?

Do climate change deniers bend the facts to avoid having to modify their environmentally harmful behavior? Researchers from the University of Bonn and the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) ran an online experiment involving 4,000 US adults, and found no evidence to support this idea. The authors of the study were themselves surprised by the results. Whether they are good or bad news for the fight against global heating remains to be seen. The study is being published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

A surprisingly large number of people still downplay the impact of climate change or deny that it is primarily a product of human activity.

But why? One hypothesis is that these misconceptions are rooted in a specific form of self-deception, namely that people simply find it easier to live with their own climate failings if they do not believe that things will actually get all that bad.

"We call this thought process 'motivated reasoning,'" says Professor Florian Zimmermann, an economist at the University of Bonn and Research Director at IZA.

Motivated reasoning helps us to justify our behavior. For instance, someone who flies off on holiday several times a year can give themselves the excuse that the plane would still be taking off without them, or that just one flight will not make any difference, or -- more to the point -- that nobody has proven the existence of human-made climate change anyway.

All these patterns of argument are examples of motivated reasoning.

Bending the facts until it allows us to maintain a positive image of ourselves while maintaining our harmful behavior.

Self-deception to preserve a positive self-image

But what role does this form of self-deception play in how people think about climate change?

Previously, there had been little scientific evidence produced to answer the question.

The latest study has now closed this knowledge gap -- and has thrown up some unexpected results.

Zimmermann and his colleague Lasse Stötzer ran a series of online experiments, using a representative sample of 4,000 US adults.

At the center of the experiments was a donation worth $20. Participants were allocated at random to one of two groups.

The members of the first group were able to split the $20 between two organizations, both of which were committed to combating climate change.

By contrast, those in the second group could decide to keep the $20 for themselves instead of giving it away and would then actually receive the money at the end.

"Anyone keeping hold of the donation needs to justify it to themselves," says Zimmermann, who is also a member of the ECONtribute Cluster of Excellence, the Collaborative Research Center Transregio 224 and the Transdisciplinary Research Area "Individuals & Societies" at the University of Bonn.

"One way to do that is to deny the existence of climate change."

As it happened, nearly half of those in the second group decided to hold on to the money.

The researchers now wanted to know whether these individuals would justify their decision retrospectively by repudiating climate change.

The two groups had been put together at random. Without "motivated reasoning," therefore, they should essentially share a similar attitude to human-made global heating.

If those who kept the money for themselves justified their actions through self-deception, however, then their group should exhibit greater doubt over climate change.

"Yet we didn't see any sign of that effect," Zimmermann reveals.

Climate change denial: a hallmark of one's identity?

This finding was also borne out in two further experiments. "In other words, our study didn't give us any indications that the widespread misconceptions regarding climate change are due to this kind of self-deception," says Zimmermann, summing up his work.

On the face of it, this is good news for policymakers, because the results could mean that it is indeed possible to correct climate change misconceptions, simply by providing comprehensive information.

If people are bending reality, by contrast, then this approach is very much a non-starter.

Zimmermann advises to be cautious, however: "Our data does reveal some indications of a variant of motivated reasoning, specifically that denying the existence of human-made global heating forms part of the political identity of certain groups of people." Put another way, some people may to an extent define themselves by the very fact that they do not believe in climate change.

As far as they are concerned, this way of thinking is an important trait that sets them apart from other political groups, and thus they are likely to simply not care what researchers have to say on the topic.

Read more at Science Daily

'Not dead yet': Experts identify interventions that could rescue 1.5°C

To meet the goals of the Paris Agreement and limit global heating to 1.5°C, global annual emissions will need to drop radically over the coming decades. Today [22 Nov], a new paper from climate economists at the University of Oxford says that this goal could still be within our reach. They identify key "sensitive intervention points" that could unlock significant progress towards the Paris Agreement with the least risk and highest impact. These include:

• Investing in clean energy technologies with consistent cost declines
• Enacting central bank policies to reduce the value of polluting assets
• Improving climate-related financial risk disclosure.

'This is not to suggest that reaching the Paris goals will be straightforward, or easy, but like Achilles' heel, our research points to the areas that could have an outsized impact,' says lead author Dr Penny Mealy, associate at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, University of Oxford.

'We need climate policies which are pragmatic and practical, designed with an understanding of where the economy and technologies are capable of quickly transforming our economies for the better.

These are those policy areas. This is how we design policy for 1.5°C,' affirms co-author Dr Pete Barbrook-Johnson of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment.

The research also highlights the areas where interventions will be more difficult and less impactful, including nuclear fission, which would be slow to roll out and could have unintended consequences; and carbon capture and storage, which presents both high barriers and risks.

To reach their conclusions, the authors devised a new framework for identifying sensitive intervention points, or SIPs, that have the characteristics necessary to radically decarbonize our global economy.

SIPs include critical tipping points -- like renewable energy becoming cheaper than coal; critical points in networks -- like powerful political figures or important technologies, and critical points in time or "windows of opportunity" that might prime the existing systems for change, such as the Covid-19 pandemic.

These intervention points must be assessed by the ease with which they can be implemented, their impact potential, and the potential for creating risks.

The authors stress that, while the framework is highly applicable to climate change, it could also be applied to solving other economic and social problems.

The ratings provided for each SIP intervention were applied subjectively based on discussions with experts, literature research, and modelling.

The framework can and should be applied regularly to reassess priorities as new data and insights become available, the authors say.

Read more at Science Daily