Six months to go and why waste a perfectly good press opportunity?
Hold on to your hat: This draft is almost the same as every other draft ever was.
A draft United Nations climate science report contains dire news about the warming of the planet, suggesting it will likely cross the key marker of 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, of temperature rise in the 2040s, and that this will be exceedingly difficult to avoid.
Blah. Blah. Must act urgently. Blah. The two messages we will never hear is that we are doing enough or spending too much.
The leak is so predictable, and such a standard marketing tool, that the IPCC even has an excuse at-the-ready:
The document’s leak has become a standard affair for major United Nations climate science reports, because they are seen by so many reviewers.
This is supposed to be a transparent process to solve a global problem. How can that be “leaked?”
A slight change in flavour is that while we were always aiming for two arbitrary degrees of warming, now we are now also aiming for an arbitrary 1.5C as well. The lower target is unachievable, apparently, allowing script writers to simultaneously say we “are past the point of no return”, going to overshoot” and “not on track” and also say “we can keep warming under the target” (just, barely, etc) depending on which target you want to refer to. This scores double points in keyword bingo. Something for everyone.
Since such rapid and severe cuts aren’t likely, the report notes that it’s virtually unavoidable that the planet will “overshoot” 1.5 degrees Celsius. To cool the Earth down afterward and avoid staying at dangerously high temperatures for long, it would then be necessary to remove carbon dioxide from the air at a massive scale — but that, too, is highly problematic.