Not surprising, given the IPCC is a branch of the United Nations. Anything it says has to be acceptable to 195 member countries, including the world's largest greenhouse gas emitters, China, the United States, India, Russia and Japan.
The IPCC isn't a group of independent scientists or left-green critics of capitalism.
Even so, this latest report uses stronger language than any previously.
It basically says it's "now or never" if we're to restrict the average global temperature rise to below 2C.
Carbon emissions need to peak in 2025 and start declining after that.
If global temperatures rise more than 2C, at a certain point — due to feedback loops — the world will be pulled into the extreme danger zone of 3-6C of warming.
In that zone, we can expect a mass die-off of the human race as global food production collapses due to droughts, water shortages and violent storms. Not to mention cities drowning, hundreds of millions of refugees and major wars.
The IPCC is getting better at presenting the doom and gloom side of the science. Which is scary. Writes itself.
Still, I have difficulty accepting the analysis of an organisation that, in its fifth report, happily concluded we could mitigate the worst of climate change and yet see global consumption increase 300 to 900 per cent by the end of the century.
That's the intergovernmental influence. Economies must keep growing. Nothing we do can divert us from this path.
Sharemarkets, investor dividends, big tech, global supply chains, bank profits, and rising consumption in wealthy countries must go on as normal. There can be no question that "normal" might actually be the problem. Or that "normal" can't and won't last.
This blind spot explains why IPCC reports put so much blind faith in new technology. Unproven technologies for sequestering carbon or the hope that renewable electricity generation and battery power will save us.
Problem is, the transition from fossil fuels to the electrification of everything will require building dams, nuclear power stations, electric vehicles en masse, and solar and wind farms everywhere. As well as large-scale battery storage to cope with peak demand, like the Onslow Dam project being mooted here.
This will take decades and need huge amounts of additional energy, which will have to come from fossil fuels because the "renewable" energy infrastructure hasn't been built.
To get to the renewable energy nirvana will require so much burning of fossil fuels that, far from emissions peaking in three years, they'll increase over the coming decades. It doesn't take much to grasp this logic, yet it seems to be beyond the IPCC.
So much of the IPCC report is waffle because it imagines saving the planet for neo-liberal capitalism. It's a difficult circle to square. Some of the best minds in the world are on it.
Cynicism aside, I concede that the IPCC reports have some useful information. And they help focus media attention on how bad things are. But they offer false hope to government policymakers, the main readers of the reports.
To offer an alternative insight, I refer to a recent study published in Nature Sustainability.
The authors conclude that to limit global warming to between 1.5C and 2C, the average carbon footprint of every human on the planet needs to be between 1.6 and 2.8 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year (tCO2).
In the United States, the average per person is 14.5tCO2 (nine times what it needs to be). While not part of this study, New Zealand's average would be comparable with the US.
In many poorer countries in Africa, Asia, the Pacific and South America, the average is less than 1 tonne per person. In sub-Saharan Africa it's 0.2tCO2.
There are people and countries contributing substantially to global warming and those that are hardly at all.
The difference with this study, compared to the IPCC, is that emissions embedded in manufacture are counted where products are consumed. Under the IPCC framework, some developed countries are showing reductions in emissions produced within their geographical boundaries due to de-industrialisation. However, those same countries' consumption of embedded emissions from the products they're buying from China tells a different story.
Breaking down the study's findings further, the top 1 per cent of people were responsible for an average of 48 tonnes a year of carbon emitted. While the bottom 50 per cent only 0.6 tonnes a year.
The study concludes that the lifestyles of the richest in wealthy countries must be drastically curbed if the world is to stand a chance of restricting warming to less than 2C.
The IPCC veers away from anything as politically charged and is, therefore, less truthful.
