I note that you project a linear response of temperature increases to anthropogenic CO2 emissions. It is well established that the impact of additional CO2 logarithmically diminishes due to emission band saturation. It roughly takes a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere to increase the temperature about 1.1C. See Wijngarrden and Happer 2020.
Hi Roger - looking forward to this series. With the Trump admin looking {might be a better term] at the U.S. National Assessment 2023 report, would you pls share a link, or two, to some of reviews there. Attribution (I do have the IPCC AR6 chart), extreme weather trends [lack of], actual findings inc.
In modelling the increased absorption of radiation as the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere increases, has the non-linearity of this relationship been taken into account? Apparently, a point is reached at which a further increase in CO2 leads to minimal extra heat absorption. I have no way of evaluating this myself but post it for comment: https://c2cjournal.ca/2024/10/a-planet-that-might-not-emneed-em-saving-can-co2-even-drive-global-temperature/
The modelers are setting up a doppelganger for RCP8.5 (in 7.0) so the lurid "climate crisis" announcements may continue (along with their grant funding).
Nitpick: AI Claude ought to be reffered to as "it". ;)
After a little Googling, I learned that by 2100, 83% of the world’s population will live in Asia (38%) and Africa(45%). According to the IEA, 83% of Asian energy production comes from fossil fuels. In Africa, 57% comes from fossil fuels and 40% from biomass for total of 97% from carbon-based sources.
Does anyone that mix can or will change in any significant way in a mere 75 years? The Global Energy Mix in 2100 under SSP37.0 that shows a fossil fuel component of 93.2% doesn’t seem quite so unrealistic.
As far as I know Asia is betting on coal, gas and rnewables. Whether the mix will change is entirely a financial matter.
The African mix is mainly due to the lack of infrastructure to supply energy to a significant proportion of the population. Hence the renewable part is mainly made up of bio-energy: wood, straw, dung, turf etc. That will change quite a lot with increasing wealth, and with Africa increasing beyond 3 billion by 2080 it will impact the global mix.
This is one of the main drivers for those who think the rich part of the world should pay for the poor nations to transition to all renewables without touching fossil fuels.
Roger: I thought high emissions scenarios had mostly been discredited when Hausfther and Peters published a PNAS paper disdaining RCP8.5 and Nature published a comment on their work. The latter is behind a paywall, but the key figure is in the third link. I don't know how seriously the climate science community took this work, but for me the gold standard.
The bottom line of their work was that "business-as-usual" closest to SSP4-6.0 and with "improvement-as-usual" it would be well within reach. However, events since then suggest "backsliding-as-usual may be more likely: the Ukraine war, the return of Trump and cheap fossil fuels as the foundation of the US economy, greater demand for AI, etc. I'm more pessimistic that I was in 2020.
Thanks to your fine work and that of others, I now ascribe zero credibility to the mainstream climate propaganda machine (scientists, modelers, media, politicians, etc). If they blatantly mischaracterize possible future scenarios to this extent — and mask the underlying assumptions — how can one trust anything they put out, including the rest of the assumptions embedded in their models?
I actually think its more likely that natural gas will see much faster growth because fracking opens up massive reserves worldwide. Even Europe has a lot of formations with potential and it puzzles me as to why they are not being explored right now.
Dear Mr. Young, I have some experience as to why natural gas is not growing, as it relates to England. In the English Midlands, there is a shale formation 6000 feet in depth. In America that would be producing enough natural gas to light the entire continent, and all the landowners who have retained the mineral rights would be rich from royalties. However, in England, mineral rights are generally not owned by the people who own or reside on the land. Mineral rights are owned either by the crown or by ancient noble families. Consequently, in England, the people who live on the land would receive no reward for the disruption caused by drilling and hydraulic fracturing. This creates a large NIMBY sentiment. When coupled with virulent Just Stop Oil agitators, there is vocal opposition to drilling just about anywhere. About a decade ago, an English politician bowed to this opposition and set forth a regulation limiting any earth tremors from hydraulic fracturing to less than 0.5 on the Richter scale. This is less than the tremor from a passing truck (lorry, over there). The consequence of that draconian limit on tremors is that hydraulic fracturing cannot be performed on English soil. So the natural gas in those shale formations cannot be produced.
Thanks for this information. It does seem like Europe in many ways acts against the interests of its own people, perhaps explaining the growing populist movement.
So the question of our time is can the new administration in the USA change the direction of “science” back to following the “scientific method” or not? All of us eager Substack readers commit our attention and funds to canceled professors like Roger while all appearances are that advocacy driven “science” will continue to rule the day. Will the advocates pay any price for crashing the power grid in Spain and Portugal? Why is it impossible to force every climate alarmist making daily contributions to mainstream media to point to where the 100 coal plants that they are predicting are actually being built? The USA is a major funding source, so why is it impossible to force some accountability?
With the energy system at 82% fossil and 18% non-carbon today, and moving into a future with a 70% increase in energy use. That would mean even with a 52% non-carbon share we would not have reduced our fossil energy use.
The climate system does not operate on percentages. We humans have a tendency to talk in percentages and getting lost in them thinking they are comparable. They rarely are.
Again very timely as I have pinned the NZ climate change commission down to distance itself from SSP5-8.5 but they are moving to SSP3.70. They have offered a meeting to discuss so this analysis is helpful but they talk if using 7.0 for ‘stress testing’. For me that would be to take your expected model and perform a sensitivity analysis to test which variables push the relevant climate impact driver to a point of policy concern. That’s a useful exercise but your policy making should still be based on your likely scenario.
Stress testing is important, but the criteria of the test need to be explicit.SSP3-7.0 was never designed for this purpose, and is not now appropriate. It is every bit as misleading as RCP8.5.
I’ll do a post soon on thinking through a “likely scenario”.
I met with two scientists with the NZ Climate Change Commission yesterday. They acknowledged that it was their job to advise the gov't on the most important climate impacts expected. they acknowledged that some effects simply are not apparent when using a likely scenario so to ascertain the climate impact drivers that are most sensitive to warming, it helps to use a warmer scenario. That sounds reasonable enough but, whilst the output information is interesting, it should not form the basis for policy making. It's like running an economic model with a $200 bbl oil price (or $10/bbl price).
All the scenarios you provided make the explicit assumption CO2 drives temperature increase exclusively. Thus the linear relationship in your scenario graph. This leads to where we’ve been since the IPCC was formed. This simple assumption is easy to understand (makes for great propaganda), but misleading for a chaotic climate system that isn’t really well understood.
There are other theories on climate and temperature increase, backed by peer reviewed articles. Solar radiation, water vapor, cloud cover, measured inability or minimal impact of CO2 to cause temperature increases, minimal impact of manmade CO2 on climate, etc. Scenarios around these should also be included before any consideration of policy options and decisions.
These are my sentiments, exactly. I have repeatedly asked Dr. Roger Pielke Jn. to comment on the excellent paper of William. A. van Wijngaarden and William Happer on the radiative transfer process titled: Infrared Forcing by Greenhouse Gases. They reviewed how the atmospheric temperatures and the concentrations of Earth’s five most important, naturally occurring greenhouse gases, H2O, CO2, O3, N2O and CH4 control thermal radiative fluxes from Earth to outer space. So far, no result.
Surely this is the crux of the matter. Pielke believes CO2 is the main driver of planetary warming. Happer and van Wijngaarden, both prominent physicists and experts in radiation physics, clearly disagree.
This is the paper that I most want to see discussed yet I see it largely being ignored.
According to Wikipedia, the source of all truth :), climate sensitivity is defined as the following:
Climate sensitivity is a key measure in climate science and describes how much Earth's surface will warm for a doubling in the atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration.
This definition suggests the effect is non-linear. How non-linear is it?
Dear Mr. John B. the absorption of infrared radiation by CO2 is indeed non-linear with concentration. It is logarithmic. Absorption increases dramatically at low CO2 concentrations, then the curve displays a "knee" at about 200 ppm or thereabouts. At concentrations above that "knee" in the curve, the increased absorption with rising CO2 slows dramatically, such that the increase in absorption from 400 to 800 ppm is actually quite small. To postulate catastrophic temperature rise with rising CO2 concentration, analysts must speculate about positive feedbacks due to rising water vapor, the "tropic hot spot" which, as I understand it, is not actually showing up in the weather balloon and satellite temperature data.
I note that you project a linear response of temperature increases to anthropogenic CO2 emissions. It is well established that the impact of additional CO2 logarithmically diminishes due to emission band saturation. It roughly takes a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere to increase the temperature about 1.1C. See Wijngarrden and Happer 2020.
Good to know that some of these scenarios are for academic purposes and it is misleading to scare people with them on headlines.
Hi Roger - looking forward to this series. With the Trump admin looking {might be a better term] at the U.S. National Assessment 2023 report, would you pls share a link, or two, to some of reviews there. Attribution (I do have the IPCC AR6 chart), extreme weather trends [lack of], actual findings inc.
Sure appreciate it. Best, Gary Hall
In modelling the increased absorption of radiation as the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere increases, has the non-linearity of this relationship been taken into account? Apparently, a point is reached at which a further increase in CO2 leads to minimal extra heat absorption. I have no way of evaluating this myself but post it for comment: https://c2cjournal.ca/2024/10/a-planet-that-might-not-emneed-em-saving-can-co2-even-drive-global-temperature/
Roger,
Great 1st post on a crucial topic!
The modelers are setting up a doppelganger for RCP8.5 (in 7.0) so the lurid "climate crisis" announcements may continue (along with their grant funding).
Nitpick: AI Claude ought to be reffered to as "it". ;)
After a little Googling, I learned that by 2100, 83% of the world’s population will live in Asia (38%) and Africa(45%). According to the IEA, 83% of Asian energy production comes from fossil fuels. In Africa, 57% comes from fossil fuels and 40% from biomass for total of 97% from carbon-based sources.
Does anyone that mix can or will change in any significant way in a mere 75 years? The Global Energy Mix in 2100 under SSP37.0 that shows a fossil fuel component of 93.2% doesn’t seem quite so unrealistic.
As far as I know Asia is betting on coal, gas and rnewables. Whether the mix will change is entirely a financial matter.
The African mix is mainly due to the lack of infrastructure to supply energy to a significant proportion of the population. Hence the renewable part is mainly made up of bio-energy: wood, straw, dung, turf etc. That will change quite a lot with increasing wealth, and with Africa increasing beyond 3 billion by 2080 it will impact the global mix.
This is one of the main drivers for those who think the rich part of the world should pay for the poor nations to transition to all renewables without touching fossil fuels.
Thank You. You didn't assume Claude's gender I hope.That could land you in a whole
different world of pain. LoL
Roger: I thought high emissions scenarios had mostly been discredited when Hausfther and Peters published a PNAS paper disdaining RCP8.5 and Nature published a comment on their work. The latter is behind a paywall, but the key figure is in the third link. I don't know how seriously the climate science community took this work, but for me the gold standard.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2017124117
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00177-3
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse1.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DOIP.JKQQuEM2kOSXYC-Ou4dHRgHaFn%26pid%3DApi&f=1&ipt=ad1349a83588ffee0af57320fcfac96ba3c9c8e6c5fcbefe666cebd6ed6098a8&ipo=images
The bottom line of their work was that "business-as-usual" closest to SSP4-6.0 and with "improvement-as-usual" it would be well within reach. However, events since then suggest "backsliding-as-usual may be more likely: the Ukraine war, the return of Trump and cheap fossil fuels as the foundation of the US economy, greater demand for AI, etc. I'm more pessimistic that I was in 2020.
Thanks to your fine work and that of others, I now ascribe zero credibility to the mainstream climate propaganda machine (scientists, modelers, media, politicians, etc). If they blatantly mischaracterize possible future scenarios to this extent — and mask the underlying assumptions — how can one trust anything they put out, including the rest of the assumptions embedded in their models?
I actually think its more likely that natural gas will see much faster growth because fracking opens up massive reserves worldwide. Even Europe has a lot of formations with potential and it puzzles me as to why they are not being explored right now.
Dear Mr. Young, I have some experience as to why natural gas is not growing, as it relates to England. In the English Midlands, there is a shale formation 6000 feet in depth. In America that would be producing enough natural gas to light the entire continent, and all the landowners who have retained the mineral rights would be rich from royalties. However, in England, mineral rights are generally not owned by the people who own or reside on the land. Mineral rights are owned either by the crown or by ancient noble families. Consequently, in England, the people who live on the land would receive no reward for the disruption caused by drilling and hydraulic fracturing. This creates a large NIMBY sentiment. When coupled with virulent Just Stop Oil agitators, there is vocal opposition to drilling just about anywhere. About a decade ago, an English politician bowed to this opposition and set forth a regulation limiting any earth tremors from hydraulic fracturing to less than 0.5 on the Richter scale. This is less than the tremor from a passing truck (lorry, over there). The consequence of that draconian limit on tremors is that hydraulic fracturing cannot be performed on English soil. So the natural gas in those shale formations cannot be produced.
Thanks for this information. It does seem like Europe in many ways acts against the interests of its own people, perhaps explaining the growing populist movement.
So the question of our time is can the new administration in the USA change the direction of “science” back to following the “scientific method” or not? All of us eager Substack readers commit our attention and funds to canceled professors like Roger while all appearances are that advocacy driven “science” will continue to rule the day. Will the advocates pay any price for crashing the power grid in Spain and Portugal? Why is it impossible to force every climate alarmist making daily contributions to mainstream media to point to where the 100 coal plants that they are predicting are actually being built? The USA is a major funding source, so why is it impossible to force some accountability?
I hope you are going to mention ocean currents?
These seem to be widely ignored, yet are showing rapid change.
If (when) the currents in our oceans change there will be rapid changes in climate in many areas.
I am not sure that our science can predict what these changes will be, any more than we can predict local weather in three months.
All this discussion of CO2 levels as a predictor if climate in the next 50 years will become somewhat irrelevant, once ocean currents start changing.
Great recommendation!
With the energy system at 82% fossil and 18% non-carbon today, and moving into a future with a 70% increase in energy use. That would mean even with a 52% non-carbon share we would not have reduced our fossil energy use.
The climate system does not operate on percentages. We humans have a tendency to talk in percentages and getting lost in them thinking they are comparable. They rarely are.
Again very timely as I have pinned the NZ climate change commission down to distance itself from SSP5-8.5 but they are moving to SSP3.70. They have offered a meeting to discuss so this analysis is helpful but they talk if using 7.0 for ‘stress testing’. For me that would be to take your expected model and perform a sensitivity analysis to test which variables push the relevant climate impact driver to a point of policy concern. That’s a useful exercise but your policy making should still be based on your likely scenario.
Stress testing is important, but the criteria of the test need to be explicit.SSP3-7.0 was never designed for this purpose, and is not now appropriate. It is every bit as misleading as RCP8.5.
I’ll do a post soon on thinking through a “likely scenario”.
I met with two scientists with the NZ Climate Change Commission yesterday. They acknowledged that it was their job to advise the gov't on the most important climate impacts expected. they acknowledged that some effects simply are not apparent when using a likely scenario so to ascertain the climate impact drivers that are most sensitive to warming, it helps to use a warmer scenario. That sounds reasonable enough but, whilst the output information is interesting, it should not form the basis for policy making. It's like running an economic model with a $200 bbl oil price (or $10/bbl price).
Excellent subject for your next series of articles. places us on the front foot of knowing where things will be steered rather than always defending
All the scenarios you provided make the explicit assumption CO2 drives temperature increase exclusively. Thus the linear relationship in your scenario graph. This leads to where we’ve been since the IPCC was formed. This simple assumption is easy to understand (makes for great propaganda), but misleading for a chaotic climate system that isn’t really well understood.
There are other theories on climate and temperature increase, backed by peer reviewed articles. Solar radiation, water vapor, cloud cover, measured inability or minimal impact of CO2 to cause temperature increases, minimal impact of manmade CO2 on climate, etc. Scenarios around these should also be included before any consideration of policy options and decisions.
These are my sentiments, exactly. I have repeatedly asked Dr. Roger Pielke Jn. to comment on the excellent paper of William. A. van Wijngaarden and William Happer on the radiative transfer process titled: Infrared Forcing by Greenhouse Gases. They reviewed how the atmospheric temperatures and the concentrations of Earth’s five most important, naturally occurring greenhouse gases, H2O, CO2, O3, N2O and CH4 control thermal radiative fluxes from Earth to outer space. So far, no result.
Surely this is the crux of the matter. Pielke believes CO2 is the main driver of planetary warming. Happer and van Wijngaarden, both prominent physicists and experts in radiation physics, clearly disagree.
Here is their paper:
[https://co2coalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Infrared-Forcing-by-Greenhouse-Gases-2019-Revised-3-7-2022.pdf].
This is the paper that I most want to see discussed yet I see it largely being ignored.
According to Wikipedia, the source of all truth :), climate sensitivity is defined as the following:
Climate sensitivity is a key measure in climate science and describes how much Earth's surface will warm for a doubling in the atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration.
This definition suggests the effect is non-linear. How non-linear is it?
Dear Mr. John B. the absorption of infrared radiation by CO2 is indeed non-linear with concentration. It is logarithmic. Absorption increases dramatically at low CO2 concentrations, then the curve displays a "knee" at about 200 ppm or thereabouts. At concentrations above that "knee" in the curve, the increased absorption with rising CO2 slows dramatically, such that the increase in absorption from 400 to 800 ppm is actually quite small. To postulate catastrophic temperature rise with rising CO2 concentration, analysts must speculate about positive feedbacks due to rising water vapor, the "tropic hot spot" which, as I understand it, is not actually showing up in the weather balloon and satellite temperature data.