Climate Cooking

How a few billionaires helped push climate science to the extremes

Happy Saturday! First, a few announcements. My paper, Scientific Integrity and U.S. “Billion Dollar Disasters” has passed peer-review and will soon be published in the new Nature journal npj Natural Hazards. You can read the as-accepted-draft of the paper at OSF, which I have just posted. (UPDATE 3PM, April 13 — I just learned that I won’t be testifying before the House on Tuesday, but still I’ll publish what would have been my written testimony here at THB). On Tuesday at 2PM ET, I’ll be testifying at the House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Pandemic at a hearing titled, “Academic Malpractice: Examining the Relationship Between Scientific Journals, the Government, and Peer Review.” Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of Science is also scheduled to testify. I’ll post my testimony and reflections following the hearing, which you can watch here.

Below, I have updated a piece that I first published at Forbes in January 2020. It tells an very important part of the story of how the most extreme emissions scenario — RCP8.5 — came to dominate climate research, assessment, and policy. It is quite an amazing tale.

This is a story of American democracy. In one sense, it’s a noble story. People with shared values came together to petition the government and the public on their political aims, just as envisioned by James Madison in Federalist 10.

In another sense it’s a story of privilege and conceit – the privilege in American democracy that accompanies being mindbogglingly wealthy and the conceit that climate politics could be best pursued by corrupting the scientific literature on climate change.

Before proceeding, let’s make a few things absolutely clear. There is no doubt that climate change is real, and is significantly influenced by our activities, particularly through the emissions of carbon dioxide.  I have long advocated for aggressive mitigation action and adaptation to climate variability and change. At the same time, I have also long argued that upholding scientific integrity should go hand-in-hand with effective climate action.

At the center of the corruption of climate science discussed here sits a highly technical scenario of the future called Representation Concentration Pathway 8.5 or RCP8.5. Longtime readers of THB will no doubt be familiar with RCP8.5 and its consequences, but for anyone needing a quick primer, have a look at our short paper in Issues in Science and Technology.

Today, I add further details to this incredible story by explaining the important role in promoting RCP8.5 played by billionaires Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg.

According to the New York Times, in November 2012, one month after stepping down from the hedge fund he led, Steyer gathered environmental leaders and Democratic party leaders around the kitchen table at his ranch in Pescadero, California. Among those in attendance were Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org, and John Podesta, who had founded the Center for American Progress (CAP) in 2003 to promote progressive causes.¹ Today, John Podesta serves as President Biden’s “climate envoy,” recently replacing John Kerry.

At the 2012 kitchen table meeting, Steyer was focused on the question: “How do you make climate change feel real and immediate for people?” He was convinced by attendees that the best way to answer this question was by appealing to people’s pocketbooks, through the economics of climate impacts.

Following this meeting, Steyer invited two collaborators and co-funders to join him — One was Michael Bloomberg, then a political independent who was completing 12 years as the mayor of New York. The other was Hank Paulson, a Republican who was a former CEO of Goldman Sachs and who had also served as Secretary of the Treasury under George W. Bush.

Each of Steyer, Bloomberg and Paulson contributed $500,000 to the initial project, which had the goal of,

“making the climate threat feel real, immediate and potentially devastating to the business world”

The initial aim was to produce a series of reports, drawing on several young academics and the expertise of external consultants at the Rhodium Group and Risk Management Solutions.

The first report was published in June, 2014 and was titled “Risky Business: The Economic Risks of Climate Change in the United States.” The Risky Business approach was a clever, if flawed, way to place economics at the center of climate policy.

The approach focused on characterizing the extreme RCP8.5 scenario as “the closest to a business-as-usual trajectory” and centered its economic analysis on that scenario:

“we focus on RCP 8.5 as the pathway closest to a future without concerted action to reduce future warming”

By focusing on the most extreme scenario as business-as-usual they guaranteed that the economic impacts of climate change that they projected into the future would be eye-poppingly large.

But in generating large economic impacts, the authors of the Risky Business report made two significant methodological mistakes. In addition to improperly characterizing the extreme RCP 8.5 scenario as “business as usual,” they improperly presented other scenarios of the IPCC as representing different policy outcomes, suggesting that we could “move” from one scenario to another: “

Moving from RCP 8.5 to RCP 2.6 (as well as RCP 4.5 and RCP 6.0) will come at a cost”

Both of these methodological choices were contrary to the appropriate use of the scenarios, according the modeling experts who created them, and who explained at the time:

“RCP8.5 cannot be used as a no-climate-policy reference scenario [”business as usual”] for the other RCPs because RCP8.5’s socioeconomic, technology and biophysical assumptions differ from those of the other RCPs”

The scenarios are completely independent from each other, and policy cannot “move” us from one to another. Consider that RCP2.6 represents a world with 3 billion less people than RCP8.5. The Risky Business methodology ignored such critical details while promoting a simple narrative.

Dodgy science published by climate advocacy groups is certainly not uncommon and it is usually not that interesting. But the genius of the Risky Business project was that it did not stop with a flashy report aimed at the daily news cycle. It undertook a far more sophisticated campaign focused on introducing its methods into the mainstream scientific literature, where they would take on a life of their own.

For instance, soon after the initial Risky Business report was released in 2014 the Steyer-Bloomberg-Paulson funded work was the basis for 11 talks at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, which is the largest annual gathering of climate researchers.

The next step was to get the Risky Business analyses published in the scientific literature where they could influence subsequent research and serve as a basis for authoritative scientific reviews, such as the U.S. National Climate Assessment.

For instance, a 2016 paper published in the prestigious journal Science from the Risky Business project featured the erroneous notion of moving from one RCP scenario to another via policy, comparing “business as usual” (RCP 8.5) and “strongest emissions mitigation” (RCP 2.6). That paper has subsequently been cited more than 1,100 times (as of April 2024) according to Google Scholar. Despite the obvious methodological flaw, the paper passed peer review and received little or no criticism. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of papers followed similarly in adopted the same assumption of “moving” between incommensurate scenarios.

In another example, a study from the Risky Business project was published in Science magazine in 2017, where the abstract brazenly announces its methodological error:

“By the late 21st century, the poorest third of counties are projected to experience damages between 2 and 20% of county income (90% chance) under business-as-usual emissions (Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5)”

The most extreme conclusion of this analysis was that the United States would see a 10% hit to its economy under the most extreme version of RCP8.5 (specifically its 99th percentile), projecting an incredible 8 degree Celsius temperature change from 2080 to 2099. There is your pocketbook impact!

This prominent paper has also been cited more than 1,100 times in other studies, according to Google Scholar. The 10% GDP loss figure would become the top line conclusion of the U.S. National Climate Assessment the very next year.

That’s a big number!

Publishing papers in the academic literature based on the flawed Risky Business methods was a formula that would be repeated time and time again. Like the introduction of a virus, the misleading reinterpretation of climate scenarios expanded throughout the climate science literature and into leading assessments, and well beyond studies that had any connection to Steyer-Bloomberg-Paulson funding..

The flawed methods spread beyond the academic literature and into policy and scientific assessments. According to Gary Yohe in 2015, the Huffington Foundation Professor of Economics and Environmental Studies at Wesleyan University and active in climate assessments for many years, the methodology used in the Risky Business project caught on and spread widely:

“states and urban areas have adopted this approach, as well as the National Academy of Sciences and the National Climate Assessment of the United States”

The 2018 U.S. National Climate Assessment (NCA) offers a particularly notable example. The work initiated by the Risky Business project was cited almost 200 times in that report, including direct references to the project’s reports as well as the work of its lead consultant, the Rhodium Group. One of the lead researchers for Risky Business was also a lead author of the NCA. His research, supported by Risky Business, was cited more than 150 times in the NCA. Yet, nowhere that I have seen was it disclosed by the NCA that this lead author was under contract with the Rhodium Group from 2015 to 2022.

Subsequently, the work begun with Steyer-Bloomberg-Paulson initial investment was taken up by a group called the Climate Impact Lab. This effort involved the project leaders from the Risky Business report and involved a collaboration of several universities and the continued involvement of the Rhodium Group. It is unclear if Steyer-Bloomberg-Paulson continued to provide funding via the Rhodium Group.

The Climate Impact Lab has thrived on using RCP8.5 to generate a steady series of media-friendly studies projecting extreme climate impacts. Among them:

• 1.5 million more people may die in India by 2100 due to extreme heat by climate change

• Rising sea levels could swamp major cities and displace almost 200 million people, scientists say

• Rise In Climate-Related Deaths Will Surpass All Infectious Diseases

All of these reports are based on the misuse of scenarios, and especially RCP8.5.

In December, 20019, the co-director of the Climate Impact Lab testified before Congress and argued that the “social cost of carbon” was far higher than previous estimates. In doing so he introduced a further methodological error by improperly pairing the extreme RCP8.5 scenario (again used as a baseline scenario in the underlying analyses) with the most pessimistic socioeconomic pathway (called SSP3). There is in fact no such thing as a RCP8.5-SSP3 scenario.

The practice of misusing RCP8.5 has continued into 2024, as I detailed in a recent post on the most recent incarnation of the social cost of carbon — Secret Sauce.

There is no hidden conspiracy. All of this is taking place in plain sight and in public, even if obscured by jargon and layers of technicalities. In fact, the political advocacy documented here was absolutely genius — a well-funded effort to fundamentally change how climate science was characterized in the academic literature, how that science was reported in the media, and ultimately how political discussions and policy options are shaped.

This effort has been phenomenally successful.

According to my search of academic citations (using Google Scholar) more than 6,700 academic papers have used “business as usual” and RCP8.5 together since 2011. If each paper is cited 15 times, that would mean that more than 100,000 papers have cited papers that mistakenly refer to RCP8.5 as “business as usual” and many of these papers improperly compare other RCP scenarios as policy options.

Further, not only did the USNCA adopted the flawed methodology of the Risky Business projects, but so too has the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, most notably in its 2019 Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate. There is no doubt that climate science and policy have been profoundly influenced by the Risky Business campaign.

Of course, the Steyer-Bloomberg-Paulson investments were not entirely responsible for the misuse of scenarios in the scientific literature, but they are clearly an important part of the story.

The corruption of climate science occurred because some of our most important institutions have let us down. The scientific peer review process has failed to catch obvious methodological errors in research papers. Leading scientific assessments have ignored conflicts of interest and adopted flawed methods. The major media has been selectively incurious as to the impact of big money in climate advocacy on climate science, assessments, and policy.

This is a story of how wealth and power sought to shape climate science in pursuit of political goals. Climate change is important, there is no doubt. But the importance of climate change does not mean that we should abandon basic standards of scientific integrity. We are going to need good science in the future — so it is best to keep it that way, no matter what cause it is enlisted to support.

❤️Click the heart if you saw Tom Cruise in the original Risky Business!

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1. A disclosure: In 2016 we learned that Steyer funded a successful campaign by CAP to have me removed as a writer for 538 in 2014, as revealed in the Wikileaks Podesta emails.