ONE of the key research facilities leading the discussion on the climate crisis is the National Centre for Climate Restoration in Melbourne, Australia, whose work is arguably a major plank underpinning the Extinction Rebellion mindset. Over the last few years, the team there has been analysing a lot of the leading climate research and issuing reports based on their meta-analyses of these studies.

Among the various criticisms of the Fifth Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were allegations that it had “systematically and grossly underestimated the risks.” One of the foundations for this criticism was that the IPCC had framed the likelihood of an outcome occurring as “unlikely” if it fell outside the central 67 per cent probability distribution.

One of the difficulties facing the IPCC is that from the outset it has been required to reach a consensus before reporting, which, as anyone who has tried to build a consensus across multiple parties knows, invariably leads to conservative agreements. This isn’t helped by the neoliberal politicians who have been largely working on behalf of the carbon profiteers. At the 2015 Paris conference on climate change, in response to the cautious tone of the IPCC, the world’s political leadership agreed that they would try very hard to hold the average global temperature increase to below 1.5°C or at the most 2°C.