Climate change: IPCC scientists report five ways to save the planet

The dangers of climate change have been well reported for years. But what’s had less attention is how the world could effectively tackle the issue.

Yesterday, UN scientists laid out a plan that they believe could help people avoid the worst impacts of rising temperatures.

The report, by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), essentially calls for a revolution in how we produce energy and power our world.

To avoid very dangerous warming, carbon emissions need to peak within three years, and fall rapidly after that.

Even then, technology to pull CO2 from the air will still be needed to keep temperatures down.

Here are five key ideas that the researchers say are critical to keeping the world safe.

The 63 dense pages of this IPCC report are littered with qualifications and dense footnotes.

But all the verbiage can’t hide the scientists’ central message. If the world wants to steer clear of dangerous warming, fossil fuels are toast.

Keeping the world under 1.5C requires emissions to peak by 2025, the researchers say, and shrink by 43% by the end of this decade.

The most effective way of making that switch is to generate energy from sustainable sources like wind and solar.

The authors point to the collapse in costs of these technologies, down around 85% across the decade from 2010.

And while the war in Ukraine is making governments in Europe flirt with carbon-rich coal once again, there’s wide political acceptance that cheap, sustainable energy is the only road to Putin-free power.

So for the temperature of the planet (as well as the politics of the present), the IPCC believes that coal should finally be retired for good.

“I think that’s a very strong message, no new coal power plants. Otherwise, you’re really risking 1.5C,” said Prof Jan Christoph Minx, from the University of Leeds, and an IPCC co-ordinating lead author.

“I think the big message coming from here is we need to end the age of fossil fuel. And we don’t only need to end it, but we need to end it very quickly.”

A few short years ago, the idea of a technological fix to climate change was generally seen as the preserve of the eccentric.

From spraying things into the atmosphere to cool the Earth to blocking out the Sun with space-based shields, various ideas were mocked, knocked and quickly forgotten.

But as the climate crisis has escalated and cutting carbon emissions has proven difficult, researchers have been forced to look again at the role of technology in both limiting and reducing CO2 in the atmosphere.

The idea of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) has now gone fully mainstream with the endorsement of the IPCC in this latest report.

The scientists are blunt – keeping temperatures down won’t really be possible without some form of removal, be it via trees or air filtering machines.

There’s a lot of opposition from environmentalists, some of whom accuse the IPCC of giving in to fossil fuel producing countries and putting far too much emphasis on technologies that in essence remain unproven.

“The major shortcoming that I see is that the report is way too weak on the rapid phase out of fossil fuels,” said Linda Schneider from the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Berlin.

“I would have hoped that the report would have put forward the most reliable kind of safe pathways towards 1.5C without an overshoot and reliance on technologies that we just don’t know if they will work.”

One of the big differences with this report from previous releases is that social science features heavily.

This is mainly focussed on the ideas of reducing people’s demand for energy in the areas of shelter, mobility and nutrition.

This covers a multitude of areas – including low carbon diets, food waste, how we build our cities, and how we shift people to more carbon friendly transport options.

Continued at the BBC.COM