Consider this. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in its Fifth Assessment Report, presented more than 100 modeled scenarios that it said had a high likelihood of keeping global temperatures within 2 degrees Celsius of preindustrial levels. Nearly all of them assumed that negative emissions technology would be viable and widely used, particularly BECCS.
But there’s a major problem: Research increasingly suggests that the process is not feasible at the scale necessary to make a real dent in global climate goals—at least, not without causing massive environmental or social disruptions. If that’s the case, some experts worry that the models could mislead policymakers into believing there’s a definite “out” if global emissions don’t fall fast enough in the future.
It’s a growing concern among international scientific bodies, as tensions grow between the modeled scenarios involving “negative emissions” and newer research. Just this month, the European Academies Science Advisory Council released a report warning against unrealistic assumptions about carbon dioxide removal, or CDR.