Emily Cunningham

I'm not a climate scientist, but it seems that we're gambling with our future the longer we delay phasing out fossil fuels. It seems a lot of these climate models deal with probabilities (ie we're X more likely to have Y outcome if we do Z.) Why not play it as safe as possible?

This is a genuine question born out of true curiosity and a desire to learn as much as I can about this crisis and what we can do about it. 4/

Hi Emily, going to take the opportunity to answer some IPCC misconceptions here, so not just your questions. 1) "IPCC is overconservative": here I recommend everyone actually go read, like not on twitter, but actually read "What lies beneath" . 1/ https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/148cb0_a0d7c18a1bf64e698a9c8c8f18a42889.pdf …

The answer is both no and yes. The IPCC tries to cover all peer-reviewed & published scientific evidence - the problem is in synthesizing and summarizing, where overconservative tendencies do happen. I wrote about them here as well. https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/148cb0_a0d7c18a1bf64e698a9c8c8f18a42889.pdf … 2/

2) overcaution is because of international compromise: again both no and yes. No in the actual report, whose content is determined by the authors (based on open review). Yes sometimes in the Summary for Policy Makers (as opposed to the report itself). 3/

3) IPCC ignores tipping points. This one is a bit baffling: how the heck do you think we even know about tipping points if not for science reported in the IPCC? Tipping points are covered in the reports, but often not well integrated into overall scenarios. 4/

4) shouldn't we be more cautious about tipping points & accelerate decarbonisation? Heck yes. So is the IPCC unreliable? NO, but beware of the overall synthesis & over-aggregating models, which btw are criticized by scientists! In the IPCC! 5/

And back to the CCC report, in my dream world, the response would have been to acknowledge hard work and momentous progress (THIS REPORT IS NOT BUSINESS-AS-USUAL! It's super ambitious!), and say ...