Recently the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. More than 200 scientists, compiling data from thousands of discrete studies, collaborated to produce the IPCC’s sixth global climate assessment.

The report states that it is “unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land.” Since the 19th century humans have heated the planetary average by 1.1 degrees Celsius, largely by burning fossil fuels, clearing forests, and adopting industrial farming techniques.

It’s tempting to hope that the comprehensive scope and increasing precision of the IPCC’s work might at last silence the fulminations of those who deny climate change is happening, or insist global warming is not caused by humans. But it won’t.

For populists around the world, memes on social media are more credible than “elites” like the IPCC. “The medium is the message,” as Marshall McLuhan famously declared, and social media is programmed to show people what they already believe.

Maybe it isn’t the diagnosis that sparks resistance to climate science. Maybe it’s the bitter medicine proposed to solve the problem.

The IPCC’s latest report concludes that we can no longer do anything to prevent continued global warming over the next 30 years. The best-case scenario, presuming nations actually limit their emissions as promised in the 2015 Paris Accords, would still see warming top out at 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2050.

Does the political will exist to produce that best-case presumption?

One of the few countries that responded publicly to the IPCC report is India, the world’s third- largest emitter. India’s environment minister, Bhupendra Yadav, took to Twitter to press the case that countries with the greatest historical emissions should carry the largest share of the reductions burden. The report, he said, supports the argument that rich countries should shrink their carbon footprints first.

The UN will soon sponsor another round of climate negotiations in Glasgow, Scotland. The goal of that summit is to revisit the emissions pledges of the Paris Accords (which most signatories are not currently meeting) in an effort to further accelerate decarbonization.

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who will play host in Glasgow, argued that the remedy is obvious. “We know what must be done to limit global warming – consign coal to history and shift to clean energy sources,” he said in a statement.

Unfortunately, coal has been a sticking point in pre-Glasgow diplomacy. An all-night G-20 meeting in June failed to produce a framework for phasing it out. India was one of the key holdouts.

India is the second largest consumer of coal behind China. It has said it will sharply increase renewable energy but nothing about when its emissions will actually start declining.

China, the leader in global emissions, also remains a wild card. China’s coal use has increased to record levels this year. Critics are pushing China to declare specific emissions goals in Glasgow. So far it has said only that its emissions will peak by 2030.

It’s not just “developing” nations struggling to quit coal. At a G-7 meeting in June, President Biden resisted a call by European countries to abandon coal.

Biden’s posture, and the fact that India and China won’t commit to actually reducing emissions, reflects an inconvenient truth about climate policy. Decarbonizing is expensive. It will eliminate lots of jobs. The “green” jobs that replace the “dirty” ones won’t be in the same places, or employ the same people.

This is why climate denial persists in populist media.

The US Bureau of Labor identifies 53,000 coal industry jobs. Studies suggest another 420,000 jobs are indirectly tied to coal. For oil and gas, direct employment exceeds 2 million and more than 10 million jobs are indirectly dependent.

Every politician fears social unrest. The Chinese Communist Party views it as an existential foe. The economic cost of decarbonizing is enormous, and the human toll will be profound. Decarbonizing faster than your economic competitors in a global marketplace is political suicide.

This is why the political will to fulfill the Paris Accords does not exist.

Perhaps the time has come to retire the idealistic dream of a globally coordinated, mutual decarbonizing scheme. Or at least diversify our bets, instead of pinning all our hopes on emissions controls.

Effective risk management requires a plan, a way to quantify progress, and a backup approach should your primary initiative fail. Plan A – rapidly reducing global emissions – is failing. Increasingly precise IPCC measurements prove that.

There are alternatives that might enable a slower transition to zero carbon. Solar geoengineering, direct carbon capture and similar technological approaches to lowering greenhouse gasses deserve a place at the table in Glasgow.

It shouldn’t matter that many climate scientists oppose these alternatives. For over 30 years the IPCC has been pitching coordinated emissions cuts as the only cure – without achieving their stated goals. Let’s start talking about Plan B.