I was looking at some material from today's IPCC report and found the attached graphic to be a great summary of mitigation measures and their effectiveness and cost (it’s figure 7 in the Summary for Policy Makers, or figure TS.23 in the Technical Summary).

It seems to suggest some different conclusions than what I see in En-ROADS. For example the amount of CO2 benefit we can get from renewables is pretty high in this report and lower in En-ROADS, whereas the amount we can get from reducing agricultural CH4 is vice versa – fairly significant in En-ROADS but much less of an impact shown here. Etc.

I realize folks won’t have had time to analyze much as the IPCC report is brand new, but I'm curious if anyone has any comments on this graphic. Should it even be compared at all to En-ROADS results, or are the two approaches using different measures?

Thanks for any insights,

Tom

Tom -- this is great question.  Thanks for taking the time to dig into the latest IPCCC tome.  

We're still processing the report, but here are some thoughts that we'll be exploring:

* Our methane slider (on the main page) includes all methane, not just agriculture (in case you were comparing to our main slider).  We're also actively working on understanding land use and agriculture emissions, so we'll be using this report to inform our work.

* We're not sure what the IPCC's baseline is. Historically many of the models used in the IPCC reports have underestimated the rapid growth in renewables.  In fact, because we benchmark against these "integrated assessment models" that had low renewables growth, En-ROADS needed to update our Baseline last year.  Now we have faster growth of solar and wind.  Punchline: we might already include some of the wind and solar "potential" the IPCC highlights in our Baseline.

* We'll also review our model assumptions on technology adoption in light of the new IPCC report.  Again, we did this last year when we revisited renewables growth, but we'll do it again to make sure we're using the latest research.

Does this help?  

How is the rest of the report sitting with everyone?

Travis thanks, that does help. I hadn't thought about the idea of different baselines but it makes sense, and from what you say either baseline could be "ahead" of the other -- or perhaps "ahead" in one area and "behind" in another.

I agree that technology adoption is an interesting piece to explore, IPCC seems to be seeing it as a minor contributor whereas En-ROADS appears to show a bigger effect from new carbon capture technologies. But I think this is also related to timeline, the IPCC report (at least the graph I shared) focuses on the next 8 years whereas En-ROADS is looking farther out after the technology has had time to mature.