In a historic December 2015 Paris accord, nearly every country on Earth agreed to take steps to keep the rise in global temperatures to “well below two degrees Celsius,” according to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
Can we do it?
That’s the question posed to MS&E Professor John Weyant, chairman of the Integrated Assessment Modeling Consortium (IAMC), a group of 60 global modeling centers tasked with turning the mountains of climate change research into complex models of different scenarios based on our current and possible future actions in reducing carbon emissions.
“It’s doable but would require a lot more effort than we’re currently expending,” said Weyant. “Knowing all that I know, I wouldn’t bet on two degrees, but I might bet on three degrees.”
Just what does Professor Weyant know? Quite a lot. Although trained as an aeronautical engineer, he has been studying energy issues and climate modeling since the late 1980s, before most of us had heard of climate change.
In the early 1990s, Weyant was recruited to join the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and to contribute to their reports about Integrated Assessment Modeling, or IAMs.
“IAMs look at both the economic costs of mitigating greenhouse gases and the impacts of the remaining greenhouse gases on people and their environment,” said Weyant. “I stepped up to write that section of the IPCC’s report because nobody else volunteered to do it,” he laughed.
In 1995, as the director of Stanford’s Energy Modeling Forum (EMF), Weyant hosted the first of many annual workshops in Colorado designed to bring together government policymakers, academia and business leaders to discuss the impacts of climate change and the role of IAMs.
“I thought we would do it for a year or two and everybody would be done with it. But I was told that first year that this climate change problem was so hard, and so beyond where the research was, that it would take at least 20 years.” The EMF will host its 22nd annual workshop this summer.
As for the IAMC, Weyant convened its eighth annual meeting in Germany this past November with more than 140 participants from all over the world and 80 submitted abstracts. Taking place just weeks before the Paris negotiations, it was the most widely attended of all IAMC meetings to date.
According to Weyant, these global collaborative sessions are crucial for figuring out where more research needs to happen, for sharing regional climate change information, and for discussing how to maximize country-specific carbon emission reduction commitments.
He emphasized the continuing need for global climate scenarios, not just country-specific or regional models. “At some point, the whole world has to add up,” said Weyant.
He gave one example for the importance of making carbon reduction plans transparent and accessible to all. During one meeting, it became clear that many countries were planning to reach their carbon reduction goals with advanced bio-fuels, specifically using Latin American ethanol produced from sugar cane.
“The problem,” said Weyant, “was that the U.S. analysts thought that they would get the lowest-cost biofuels from Latin America, but so did the Europeans and the Asians… I realized that this can’t be the way this is going to work. Everyone is going to bid up the price two or three times.” This sharing of information resulted in the initiation of a global EMF biofuels study.
When asked how much an impact the IAMC’s large database of climate scenarios is having on the world’s carbon reduction commitments, Weyant said that it had a significant impact on both Paris and the U.S. negotiations with China. “Our goal was to help frame the policy process and in that we’ve been successful,” said Weyant.
The EMF’s and IAMC’s jobs didn’t end with the Paris accord. Weyant said he sees the organization’s future role as “both scorekeepers for Paris and innovators for new commitments or coalitions that could strengthen carbon reduction efforts moving forward.”
Weyant said that although the country specific commitments reached in Paris (known as Intended Nationally Determined Contributions or INDCs) were non-binding, the system will provide “transparency” to allow for tracking of carbon reductions, for better modeling scenarios, and better understanding of what is happening on the ground in the major regions of the globe.
When asked how we should feel about the world committing to a temperature target that might be just out of reach, Weyant said that it’s important to draw a line in the sand and have a clear “aspirational target.” Otherwise, time passes, and soon three degrees is out of reach, too.
“It’s true that our studies show that if you’re really serious about a low target, you ultimately probably need some kind of technology breakthrough. But I’m optimistic. There are some very smart people working on this challenge,” said Weyant. “I know that we as a world community can make a huge difference, if we set our minds to it.”
Written by: Rachel Street
