2023, Kundzewicz, Zbigniew W., Choryński, Adam, Olejnik, Janusz, Schellnhuber, Hans J., Urbaniak, Marek, Ziemblińska, Klaudia

The ongoing debate on global climate change has polarized societies since ever. The attitude of an individual towards its anthropogenic nature as well as the need and extent to which human beings should mitigate climate warming can result from a number of factors. Also, since the consequences of such alteration in global climate have no borders and became much more severe in the last decades, it is worth it to shed some more light on a current state of an interplay between scientific findings and climate policies. In this paper, we examine a low-dimensional space of possible attitudes toward climate change, its impact, attribution, and mitigation. Insights into those attitudes and evidence-based interpretations are offered. We review a range of inconvenient truths and convenient untruths, respectively, related to fundamental climate-change issues and derive a systematic taxonomy of climate-change skepticism. In addition, the media track related to climate change is reconstructed by examining a range of cover stories of important magazines and the development of those stories with global warming. In a second major step, we span a low-dimensional space of outcomes of the combined climate science-policy system, where each of the sub-systems may either succeed or fail. We conclude that the most probable outcome from today’s perspective is still the same as it was 12 years ago: a tragic triumph, i.e., the success of climate science and the simultaneous failure of climate policy.

2023, Kundzewicz, Zbigniew W., Olejnik, Janusz, Urbaniak, Marek, Ziemblińska, Klaudia

Huge amounts of carbon being sequestered in forest ecosystems make them an important land carbon sink at the global scale. Their ability to withdraw carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere, whose concentration is gradually increasing due to anthropogenic emissions, renders them important natural climate-mitigation solutions. The urgent need for transition from high to zero net emission on country, continental, and global scales, to slow down the warming to an acceptable level, calls for the analysis of different economic sectors’ roles in reaching that ambitious goal. Here, we examine changes in CO2 emission and sequestration rates during recent decades focusing on the coal-dominated energy sector and Land Use, Land-Use Change, and Forestry (LULUCF) as well as wood production at the country level. The main purpose of the presented study is to examine the potential of storing carbon in standing forest biomass and wood products in Poland as well as the impact of disturbances. The ratio of LULUCF absorption of CO2 to its emission in Poland has ranged from about 1% in 1992 to over 15% in 2005. From a climate-change mitigation point of view, the main challenge is how to maximize the rate and the duration of CO2 withdrawal from the atmosphere by its storage in forest biomass and wood products. Enhancing carbon sequestration and storage in forest biomass, via sustainable and smart forestry, is considered to be a nature-based climate solution. However, not only forests but also wood-processing industries should be included as important contributors to climate-change mitigation, since harvested wood products substitute materials like concrete, metal, and plastic, which have a higher carbon footprint. The energy perspective of the paper embraces two aspects. First, CO2 sequestration in forests and subsequently in harvested wood products, is an effective strategy to offset a part of national CO2 emissions, resulting largely from fossil fuel burning for energy-production purposes. Second, wood as biomass is a renewable energy source itself, which played an important role in sustaining energy security for many individual citizens of Poland during the unusual conditions of winter 2022/2023, with a scarce coal supply.