The USGCRP released the National Climate Assessment Five on Wednesday 15 November. I recorded a few initial impressions for my upper division course in Climate Change Biology, BSC3307C. You can view the recording here. Be advised that I use terms and concepts that are drawn from previous lectures in my courses on climate change.

The first fews slides are a review of recent papers on Carbon Dioxide Removal and Marine Cloud Brightening. These are not directly relevant to the NCA5.

The NCA5 includes major aspects of climate justice including intergenerational, ethnic, and economic disparities of climate impacts. This is long overdue for US programming on climate change and very welcome. Missing is development of how mitigation and adaptation will realistically address these issues of equity. The NCA5 falls short on social science and fails to address the economics of wealth accumulation. Also inadequately developed is a review of health impacts of fossil fuels. The previous comprehensive review was published in 2016 and needs substantial update.

I have major misgivings about the NCA5 with respect to the heavy reliance on big-tech carbon capture and direct air carbon capture. The data do not support these approaches as productive solutions in the near term. Much of this technology is immature and ineffective. Scaling in time and space would be similar in scope to colonizing Mars. In my view much more can be accomplished by intensive land use management and restoration of disrupted ecosystems for carbon drawdown over the next few decades.

As I continue to master the literature, there is one central reality that seems apparent to me: The mitigation solutions that are being developed lack a solid ecological foundation. The climate science and economics that drive the Integrated Assessment Models have made assumptions about how the Earth System functions without adequate consideration of the complexity of how life mediates the carbon cycle across scales of minutes to millennia. Ignoring and oversimplifying this reality has been a consistent failure of civilization.