Emily Cunningham

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 ...

... we have an appetite for more ambition, and what's more we're going to create the popular and political will for more ambition, building on fantastic momentum of civil disobedience & climate emergency. And use the report to pinpoint areas of focus for this. Just a dream. End/

Thank you, Julia, this is extremely helpful context. Amazon tech workers used the IPCC as a guide in our open letter to the company around climate, but I had a nagging worry that perhaps we weren't using aggressive enough timelines.