It doesn’t get any better than this.
At least the author has the guts to say that the IPCC should practice what it preaches.
The IPCC should aggressively limit its own emissions instead of requiring in-person sessions and the attendant long-haul flights. Although meetings contribute only a tiny fraction of total global emissions, improving accountability would have an outsized impact on the IPCC’s effectiveness, and would be a case study for robust, internationally coordinated mitigation.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01707-5
He notes that people such as myself will use the hypocrisy to ridicule and criticize those activists who don’t walk the walk.
This irony does not go unnoticed across the political spectrum. Conservatives point to individual researchers’ emissions to justify lack of urgency or to validate their view that institutional decarbonization is impossible; progressives see a lack of effective action and a growing philosophical barrier between science and activism.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01707-5
While I disagree with this guy’s point of view, his wokeness, and silly equity framing, his writing is logical and not the least bit rationalizing.
The emissions associated with the IPCC process are not trivial, but they are manageable. The challenges mirror those of the wider mitigation problem: assessment of direct and indirect emissions, the need for fairness in the face of robust targets, the reliability of removal methods and the need for international agreement on how to verify them.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01707-5
Even failure to achieve targets would be useful, by highlighting real-world limitations in net-zero policy assumptions, which could then inform wider societal strategy.
As the July elections for the next assessment cycle approach, IPCC members should remember that nobody is better placed to demonstrate how to eliminate emissions. The IPCC’s actions matter, not just its words. Although it might make climate scientists uncomfortable, what the IPCC does about its own carbon emissions might be as crucial to its effectiveness as advancing cogent and robust science.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01707-5
