I finally read the 2017 report What Lies Beneath, by David Spratt and Ian Dunlop. I'm now nauseated and have a bellyache. We can learn a lot, including the difference between scientific norms and risk-based norms.
"Risk is defined as the product of the likelihood and consequence of an outcome." [ emphasis mine]
By using scientific norms, the IPCC vastly misrepresented planetary reality, as if it were a table top physics experiment.
... 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.”
One is only justified in discounting a one-in-three probability if that outcome is trivial. TRIVIAL! Risk analysis multiplies the seriousness of the outcome with it's likelihood. Were risk-based norms been used, nobody could have downplayed our threat.
At present, the Paris Agreement voluntary emission reduction commitments, if implemented, would result in planetary warming of 3.4°C by 2100, ... 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 result in around 5°C of warming, according to a MIT study....
Yet 3°C of warming already constitutes an existential risk. A 2007 study by two US national security think-tanks concluded that 3°C of warming and a 0.5 metre sea-level rise would likely lead to “outright chaos” and “nuclear war is possible”, emphasising how “massive non-linear events in the global environment give rise to massive nonlinear societal events”.... This likely scenario for a 3°C rise does not take into account the considerable risk that self-reinforcing feedback loops set in when a certain threshold is reached, leading to an ever increasing rise in temperature. [emphasis mine]
We know the Paris Agreement won't be met.
... the capacity to adapt, in both the natural and human worlds, is inversely proportional to the pace of change, amongst other factors.
If the rate should exceed 0.4°C per decade, all ecosystems will be quickly destroyed, opportunistic species will dominate, and the breakdown of biological material will lead to even greater emissions of CO2 .
In addition, existential risks "demand" special risk management techniques beyond regular risk management expertise.
They are not amenable to the reactive (learn from failure) approach of conventional risk management, and we cannot necessarily rely on the institutions, moral norms, or social attitudes developed from our experience with managing other sorts of risks. Because the consequences are so severe — perhaps the end of global human civilisation as we know it — “even for an honest, truth-seeking, and well-intentioned investigator it is difficult to think and act rationally in regard to… existential risks”....
Existential risk management requires brutally honest articulation of the risks, opportunities and the response time frame, the development of new existential risk-management techniques outside conventional politics, and global leadership and integrated policy.
text from article,image source
Read the entire report if you dare. They say that the IPCC obsession with probability, instead of using risk assessment, "favours the familiar over the unknown and unexpected" and "fantasizes about the replicability of the singular". It's kinda like watching reruns of classic movies, as you sit in a locked burning building.
Ruth, excellent information! I don't like the implication of living things. Did you see the report of a heat wave in India?
I sent another news article from India on Facebook and it was rejected because of the bodies laying on the street. Facebook state the photo was too "sexual."
<groan> Bodies in the street too "sexual". What a Dominator dismissal. Facebook can be relied upon to filter news to fit their agenda. I found the news about the heatwave in India a scary foreshadow of our future.
... Herman and Chomsky postulate that five major filters (ownership, size and profit orientation of dominant media; advertising; sourcing; flak; and dominant ideologies, fear, othering) work to “manufacture consent.”
As researcher and author Tim Coles notes in a Renegade Inc. interview, one of the aims of propaganda is to “alienate the public from their own interests,” so it’s natural that “whenever people in power are telling you that fake news is undermining democracy, they really mean that alternative sources of information are challenging their grip on power.”