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Dear IPCC, I’m Planetary CFO. I’d like to make a plea for your next assessment report on climate change. Please include important materials (listed below) from your previous assessment reports, and additional ones from other sources (which I also include below), in your next report. These are particularly important and useful materials for people like myself who frequently use excerpts from IPCC reports when combatting misinformation and disinformation about climate change. I include the recommended materials at the end of this message. IPCC reports are uniquely positioned and respected as vehicles for communicating the nature of AGW, and the urgency of tackling it, to a variety of non-specialist audiences and especially to policy makers in governments around the world. I want to say to all of those involved in the work you do: “Well done. Great work. Keep going, knowing that your work is helping. Keep your eyes on the prize – a liveable planet enabling all of us, and the rest of nature in balance, to flourish.” When producing reports, I know there is pressure to only focus on what’s new, for the sake of brevity. However, the following charts are particularly important to convey the most important aspects of AGW and its impacts. If their continued inclusion means reports get longer, then my recommendation would be to use summaries, even summaries of summaries, so that they continue to be accessible and impactful. Unfortunately, if you only rely on the existence of these materials in previous reports (and not reproduce and update them in future reports), people who attack the IPCC’s work will use that to their advantage, for example by claiming that a chart or diagram has been ‘dropped’ from the latest report ‘because it is wrong’. Many AGW dismissives or delayists attack the IPCC’s work because they know it is important and influential. Don’t give such people easy opportunities to make unfounded criticisms that are difficult and time consuming to refute, by omitting these important materials. Inclusion of the following materials (updated, of course, where more recent data is available) helps many people, including myself, to explain to non-experts that:
List of charts / diagrams / other content (I’m not necessarily recommending the sequence I present them in here) 1. Headline conclusion/finding “It is unequivocal that …” I’d recommend including that human activities from unabated fossil fuel burning and land use are the main drivers of recent warming. 2. Global average temps - Human causes signal has emerged from natural variations noise since industrialisation.  The right hand version of the “hockey stick” is particularly important because it shows how strongly the human drivers (signal) has emerged from the natural variability (noise) in the last 40 years. 3. Global temps and CO2, going back far enough to illustrate unprecedented nature of recent warming (both in size and in rate of rise). https://earth.org/data_visualization/a-brief-history-of-co2/   Caution is required in the interpretation of these two charts, for the following reasons:
4. Warming drivers (human and natural).  5. Future scenarios of GHG emissions and warming – scaled to similar horizontal timelines   6. Future impacts on global GDP through to 2100. Lenton et al (2023) “The emperors new climate scenarios”. https://actuaries.org.uk/media/qeydewmk/the-emperor-s-new-climate-scenarios.pdf  or Keen (2023) “Loading the dice against pension funds” https://ecology.iww.org/PDF/misc/LOADING_THE_DICE_AGAINST_PENSION_FUNDS--1.pdf  The work of Lenton, Keen and others draws on research into climate tipping points. Although there are large uncertainties, for example concerning the timings of tipping points and the interactions between tipping points, each other and other climate factors, they need to be included more explicitly and comprehensively in your analyses. That's because they represent a significant potential driver of collapse in biological and human systems, and there is asymmetric risk in the current situation. The risk of over-reacting in our responses to tipping points is far less than the risk of failing to act sufficiently to avoid the tipping points and having them create the most damaging impacts ever seen in human history. The Precautionary Principle applies here more than in almost any other conceivable situation. When analysing the damage functions (actual historical and future modelled) there needs to be an unpicking of the total damages, primarily into damages caused by AGW and those that would be the case if AGW didn't exist. (This is similar to the approach of unpicking the human drivers signal from the natural variations noise in temperature hockey sticks). At a secondary level of analysis, the damages from human activities should be grossed up, to account for the damages avoided by human activities (ie adaptations), eg zoning of human development areas by their level of climate damage risk, disaster-resilient built infrastructure, early warning systems and evacuation or resettlement schemes etc. To express this in a simple formula: Net (observed) AGW disaster damage = Gross damage that would be caused by AGW without adaptations - effects of adaptations (in reducing damages) 7. Future impacts on human wellbeing and life satisfaction through to 2100 This work illustrates why we need better measures for impact on humanity than GDP, because global GDP is a poor proxy for human wellbeing. GDP had its place in driving post-WW2 recovery. Its fundamental deficiencies did not represent a high risk at that time. However, the situation has moved on. It is now a metric that is not fit for purpose. Overemphasis on GDP is now driving humanity in the wrong direction. There are diminishing returns (of wellbeing and life satisfaction) to growth in GDP. In practice, metrics that involve GDP will still need to be produced (because it is so entrenched) to provide some stability during transition. But better proxies for human wellbeing will need to replace it by the end of the transition to a sustainable future. The following two diagrams are from Inglehart (2018) “Cultural Evolution – peoples motivations are changing and reshaping the world” (Cambridge University Press)   8. Current rate of global warming compared with previous rates of warming during extinction events. The following diagram is from: https://thecottonwoodpost.net/2019/12/10/modern-climate-change-is-10x-faster-than-historic-global-warming-mass-extinction-events/  It demonstrates how the current rate of global warming far exceeds rates of previous warming during mass extinction events.
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