Research Explainer

By Dennis Meredith

The widely recognized shortcomings of the UN climate conference COP28 stem in large part from what I call climate delusionism. Unlike climate denialists who reject the reality of climate change, climate delusionists perpetuate comforting fallacies that have downplayed the true impacts of climate change. Those fallacies include that current climate plans and technologies could somehow avoid those impacts.

This delusionism has bred a complacency that has weakened the drive toward the environmentally benign energy system we need to avoid climate disaster. Delusionists’ whistling past a sprawling climate graveyard has also led to unrealistic climate policy and misleading media climate coverage.

A prime example of delusionism is the ignoring of the fatal structural flaws in the Paris Agreement. Those flaws include that the agreement is voluntary, with no penalties for violating it, and with nebulous wording that allows evasion – e.g., “a Party may at any time adjust its existing nationally determined contribution. . .” What’s more, honoring the agreement would require countries to compromise their economic well-being, for example by giving up lucrative income from fossil fuels.

Ironically, the scientific centerpiece of the agreement is itself unscientific. The 2° Celsius global temperature increase limit that the agreement advocates is not a scientific number, but an arbitrary political number. It has a highly dubious provenance. The limit did not originate from analysis of scientific data on global temperatures, historical records, glacial melting, ecological impacts, and so on. Rather, it was merely based on the global temperature rise believed to occur if the atmospheric CO₂ level doubled. Economist William Nordhaus suggested the 2°C limit in the 1970s in two informal, non-peer-reviewed discussion papers. Even Nordhaus himself called the limit “extremely tentative,” “deeply unsatisfactory,” and “rough guesses.”

As climatologist Reto Knutti and colleagues wrote in a critique of the 2°C number, “no scientific assessment has clearly justified or defended the 2°C target as a safe level of warming.” The lower 1.5°C limit, by the same token, was not chosen because it represented some safe level. It was chosen because scientists believed that the damage from global warming would be less than for a 2°C increase. It’s like finding that a smaller hole in a boat is safter than a bigger hole.

The Paris Agreement also suffers deep flaws in its function. For example, countries’ reports of their emissions constitute a highly inaccurate Tower of Babel. An investigation by The Washington Post of 196 countries’ emission reports to the UN found a huge gap between their declared emissions and their actual production. The gap ranged from 8.5 billion to 13.3 billion tons a year of unreported emissions, found the Post investigation. By comparison, the lower number matches the annual emissions of the US; the higher number approaches those of China.

Delusionists have also ignored stark climate realities—among them that global ice melting and heat waves will not only continue but worsen.  An unrelenting global temperature rise is literally baked in because analyses have revealed that there is about a decade-long lag between a given CO₂ level and the maximum effect on temperature. And since  CO₂ levels have risen steadily over the past decades, so inevitably will temperatures.

Another climate reality delusionists have ignored is that reductions in CO₂ emissions will not affect the continuing rise in CO₂ levels. Any such reductions are not a sign of “progress,” but rather a lowering of emissions amid a huge, continuing release of CO₂ into the atmosphere. CO₂ levels will not fall because a large fraction of emitted CO₂ has a hellishly long atmospheric lifetime—measured in centuries. The complexity of CO₂ processing in the environment means that millennia will pass before the carbon emitted today will be thoroughly absorbed.

Delusionists have also accepted the comforting fallacy that—if global temperatures were to overshoot 1.5°C—they could be reduced back to desirable levels by carbon capture and storage (CCS). In fact, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has concluded that overshoot is almost inevitable, even with major reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. And the International Energy Agency (IEA) has asserted that without CCS, “reaching net-zero [emissions] will be virtually impossible.”

CCS technology is still far from being deployed on a mass scale. As the IEA concluded, “the story of [CCS] has largely been one of unmet expectations: its potential to mitigate climate change has been recognized for decades, but deployment has been slow and so has had only a limited impact on global CO₂ emissions.”

Most prominently, however, was that COP28 participants’ naive advocacy of a phaseout of fossil fuels ignored that they are inescapably fundamental to the global economy. And they will not be replaced by renewable energy. The current share of the global energy supply of solar, wind, hydro, geothermal and ocean energy is only 5.5 percent, and it will not rise to replace the massive contribution of fossil fuels.

Decades would be required for such an energy transition, according to policy analyst Vaclav Smil. Charting the history of past energy transitions, for example from wood to coal or oil, Smil concluded that two to three generations would be required to capture a large share of the energy market. He wrote, “Renewables are not taking off any faster than the other new fuels once did, and there is no technical or financial reason to believe they will rise any quicker. . . . Today’s great hope for a quick and sweeping transition to renewable energy is fueled mostly by wishful thinking and a misunderstanding of recent history.”

And while delusionists proclaim that renewables account for almost 95 percent of new global electricity generation capacity, they ignore that they are not replacing existing fossil-fuel-powered capacity; and thus, are not reducing emissions. Similarly, when they tout a large percentage increase in renewables, they neglect to note that it is from an extremely small base.

“The world has never truly undergone an energy transition,” wrote energy economist Richard Newell and policy researcher Daniel Raimi. “Instead, the world has experienced a series of energy additions, where new fuels build atop the old, rising like a skyscraper under construction. . . . These new energy sources—like the ones that came before them—are simply stacking on top of the old ones.”

Delusionists who declare that wind and solar energy have become cheaper than coal ignore studies concluding that they become uneconomic at higher levels of market penetration, due to the need for major grid re-engineering and expensive backup storage.

Concluded an MIT study, “Even if solar PV (photovoltaic) generation becomes cost-competitive at low levels of penetration, revenues per kW of installed capacity will decline as solar penetration increases until a breakeven point is reached, beyond which further investment in solar PV would be unprofitable. . . . Without government policies to help overcome these challenges, it is likely that solar energy will continue to supply only a small percentage of world electricity needs.”

In another study, energy economist Lion Hirth found that at low market penetration, wind and solar are comparable in value to a constant source such as coal or natural gas.  However, when wind power reaches 30 percent of market share, or solar reaches 15 percent, their value drops well below that of a constant source.

Finally, delusionists have bought into two “big D” delusions — that greenhouse gas levels will magically stop rising; and that the 1.6 trillion tons of CO₂ we’ve already put into the atmosphere will not have deeply catastrophic impacts.

The antidote to climate delusionism is a clear-eyed climate realism—one that will propel global society to aggressively mitigate climate impacts and adapt to them. Our very survival depends on it.

(Dennis Meredith is the author of The Climate Pandemic: How Climate Disruption Threatens Human Survival.)