I can’t wait for the Doge team to discover the scandal around RCP8.5 based federally funded research that was and continues to distort “climate science”. Could Roger’s long ignored exposure of this scandal finally find its day in the sun?
I have now read the paper by Lopez et.al., and their analysis is in my view heavily coloured by a wish that the stories of 100% renewables and the emerging hydrogen economy are true.
Be that as it may, I find the more interesting part to be the insistence of the IEA that we will be using less energy in the future then now while the global population increases. As you point out, they are missing the mark on this one.
Then it is very interesting to see the projections on nuclear. Lopez et.al. seem to be anti-nuclear, and the IEA do not know how to make heads or tails of it yet.
On solar PV, the story is the same as it was for wind may years ago. It comes from almost nothing and is starting into something - it is hard to predict, but you should not lose any sleep over the seemingly steep increase which is more an artefact of the y-axis scale than anything else.
I find this sentence in the "Conclusion" chapter to be telling. The preceding part says that we already have technology for Power-to-X (e.g. electricity to synthetic fuel), but penetration is limited artificially (according to Lopex et.al.) and thus penetration in the IEA models appear limited: "This limitation could potentially be overcome if affordable electricity-based fuels and chemicals were allowed to have higher penetration in the hard-to-abate segments, which may be exogenously controlled as an input parameter."
In shorter, laymens terms: "If we just force the model we can make it appear that Power-to-X will be a major factor".
"Then it is very interesting to see the projections on nuclear. Lopez et.al. seem to be anti-nuclear, and the IEA do not know how to make heads or tails of it yet."
One can't tell whether the person making predictions is "pro" something or "anti" something, simply by the predictions themselves. A great example of this is my own predictions about nuclear power in the United States.
I *worked* in the nuclear power industry...for the Babcock & Wilcox (B&W) Nuclear Power Division, which designed the nuclear reactor and associated equipment for Three Mile Island. I'm absolutely in strong support of nuclear power, where it makes sense...which is cold, wet places that are fairly densely populated. The U.S. northeast and midwest (e.g., Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, etc.) are perfect examples of great places to build nuclear reactors.
*However*, I also know from my experience at B&W that the industry at that time was hopelessly wrapped up in red tape. I've given the example that the Final Safety Analysis Report (FSAR) for the three B&W Oconee nuclear reactors in South Carolina was about 500 pages long. But the FSAR for the one Midland power plant in Michigan was about 20,000 pages long...and growing...when the plug was pulled on the nuclear reactor, and it was converted to a natural gas power plant.
So if you look at my predictions in 2019 and 2024 versus the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) Annual Energy Outlook (AEO), my nuclear numbers for 2050 are below theirs.
But even there...my numbers came up *substantially* from 2019 to 2024, because, between those years, it seemed clear to me that the U.S. wasn't going to allow the vast majority of the reactors currently operating to shut down by 2050.
So here are the projected electrical energy outputs in 2050, in billions of kilowatt-hours, from EIA-AEO and me (MAB). The predictions were made in 2019 and then in 2024:
EIA-AEO (2019): 672 billion kWh in 2050
MAB (2019): 140 billion kWh in 2050
EIA-AEO (2024): 625 billion kWh in 2050
MAB (2024): 500 billion kWh in 2050
Summary: A prediction doesn't necessarily reflect what one *wants* to happen.
Thank you for this. A very interesting analysis, I will be reading the paper itself to see what you may or may not have left out :-) I tried my hand at such an anlysis some 10 years agobut never finished it. Good to see someone took the effort.
That said, there is always a bias in these reports towards a politically desired outcome. In recent years we see this in terms of the projected development of the energy mix, where the idea is that some "renewable" energy should take an increasing portion of the mix. This misses the mark consistently as it is more about what some wishes to be true than it is about real life market mechanisms.
In my own line of work, R&D on energy systems for ships, we have had the constant wish for introduction of alternative fuels for the last 10 years. In the real world nothing has changed - shipping is still 99.9% fossil fuels, but the maritime energy outlooks have promoted and emphasized hydrogen, ammonia, methanol and biofuel in that order. The outlooks are more in line with NGOs than they are with the industry. The current, albeit fading, view is that hydrogen is out, ammonia will save the maritime world. The emerging view seems to be that synthetic fuels and biofuels might be significant players. And nuclear lurking in the background.
Ammonia might end up in the "tombstone regulation" boneyard.
Solar photovoltaic capacity addition has exceeded their scenarios because of massive subsidy. However, the trend from a year or so and into the future will look quite different as reality intrudes.
“The IEA has consistently projected rapid growth in nuclear power in its normative scenarios — which would be necessary to achieve rapid rates of decarbonization. However, the real world has trailed all WEO normative scenarios since 2010.”
Hi Roger, isn’t this what we should expect given that the world has not even been close to putting in place the policies required for the normative scenarios?
I very much agree with Robert Graves below. However, I am less charitable than he is. My take on this issue is "I will knowingly lie to the public to support the official narrative, even though all of us scientists know it is false. My funding is more important than the truth." That totally sucks!!!
"The continued and widespread use of RCP8.5 (and the like) remains a scandal of gargantuan proportions in climate science."
This is true, but I suspect the primary reason for it is that the more dramatic the predictions of a climate study, the easier it becomes to get funding for subsequent studies. RCP 8.5's "We're all gonna die" is so much more interesting to largely non-technical readers than RCP 2.6's "there's nothing much to get worried about".
One of the major problems facing academia is the necessity of spending a significant portion of one's mental energy on obtaining funding, as opposed to doing the actual research work that the funding enables.
Impeccable timing. Will commit it to memory after a couple more read throughs. Where does economics, women's rights fall in the IPCC subgroups? Are there economics agencies, data collectors besides McKinsey, consultants, world Bank that amass public data? That you trust? Where does population fall into the subgroup context?
Economics is considered within the integrated asset models used to project future emissions and concentrations. Women's rights isn't considered at all, although we can assume that nations were women are privileged (such as Western Europe) will eventually lose population, and the proportion of women living in cultures where women don't have equal rights will increase slightly over time. This however is of no interest to the climate modeling community, which would be more focused on total population living in "energy consumption per capita" buckets.
What's evident to me is that the key missing element in these models is the amount of oil and gas available to be consumed as fuel (oil and gas volumes used for asphalt or plastics are somewhat irrelevant). This is the elephant in the room I have been pointing out for over a decade...we need models to incorporate the inevitable scarcity of fossil fuels and how that would impact third world countries unable to pay the higher prices the oil industry will require to put those fuels on the table.
The most important thing about scenarios is that they need to be plausible and internally consistent.
Instead of 'outlook' and 'normative' I would prefer to distinguish scenarios based on whether they are based on forecasting or backcasting. WEO, but also 'current policies' and 'announced pledges' are forecasts/scenarios and Net Zero Energy scenario is a backcasting scenario.
The best use of scenarios is to sketch diverse and different possible futures. Choices, decisions, policies can then be tested in these different worlds on their impact and effectiveness.
The idea that we can plan the world by backcasting is of course an illusion.
Thank you for this Roger - most interesting. I know this is not the main thrust of the piece, but the IPCC RCP scenarios were mentioned. Is it possible from available temperature data to say which of the scenarios provides a best fit to observations?
I suspect the AR5 RCP6 is closest. One issue we are missing is the lack of assessment of how scenarios and models perform over time. I used to keep spreadsheets showing how they diverged (or didn't), but I eventually found getting the data was becoming more difficult, so I stopped doing it. I limited my comparisons to AR5 because those model runs barely enough time to make comparisons worthwhile.
Only if additional CO2 has the same warming effect as past additions. If Happer and others are correct, it will not. Given the much higher CO2 levels of the past, there must be some negative feedback mechanism.
My projections include a significant oil price increase after 2035, and a similar natural gas price increase around 2060. These rises lead to lower consumption independent of policy. Unfortunately the oil and gas markets are really hard to predict, so the only thing I can guarantee is that sometime in the future their prices will be a lot higher. For what it's worth my projected temperature anomaly in 2100 is 2.3 C.
Is the 2.2 C warming projected by 2100 relative to the late 1800s when global surface temperature data begins? I believe we already have more than 1 C since that time.
A scenario is essentially an act of the human imagination. It is presented in the form of an If… Then… statement. The description of this statement in the form of mathematical equations is then mistaken in the media for scientific fact.
These are no internationally recognized and enforced rules about how to judge and disqualify implausible scenarios. Anyone can use or invent any scenario they want, as an advocacy tool. Hence the longevity of RCP 8.5.
Does the inevitable, widespread misuse and misunderstanding of climate scenarios do more harm than good?
AR5 RCP8.5 lives on for political reasons. To see just how poorly designed it was you can take the results from 30 climate models fed RCP8.5 concentrations and compare their atmospheric CO2 concentrations to actual data (depending on the model structure, the model may actually estimate concentrations rather than using the RCP8.5 projection).
There is an art to using scenarios effectively. Shell used to use them heavily and not too badly. They are frequently misused. The most common misuse is to choose a single variable and then create three scenarios, automatically making the middle one look plausible.
I suspect it might be better at the nuke and solar progress on a country by country basis, since countries vary in their access to nuke technology and raw materials, amount of solar radiation likely to be captured, and amount of public funding supporting either industry, as well as other country-specific factors.
I can’t wait for the Doge team to discover the scandal around RCP8.5 based federally funded research that was and continues to distort “climate science”. Could Roger’s long ignored exposure of this scandal finally find its day in the sun?
I have now read the paper by Lopez et.al., and their analysis is in my view heavily coloured by a wish that the stories of 100% renewables and the emerging hydrogen economy are true.
Be that as it may, I find the more interesting part to be the insistence of the IEA that we will be using less energy in the future then now while the global population increases. As you point out, they are missing the mark on this one.
Then it is very interesting to see the projections on nuclear. Lopez et.al. seem to be anti-nuclear, and the IEA do not know how to make heads or tails of it yet.
On solar PV, the story is the same as it was for wind may years ago. It comes from almost nothing and is starting into something - it is hard to predict, but you should not lose any sleep over the seemingly steep increase which is more an artefact of the y-axis scale than anything else.
I find this sentence in the "Conclusion" chapter to be telling. The preceding part says that we already have technology for Power-to-X (e.g. electricity to synthetic fuel), but penetration is limited artificially (according to Lopex et.al.) and thus penetration in the IEA models appear limited: "This limitation could potentially be overcome if affordable electricity-based fuels and chemicals were allowed to have higher penetration in the hard-to-abate segments, which may be exogenously controlled as an input parameter."
In shorter, laymens terms: "If we just force the model we can make it appear that Power-to-X will be a major factor".
Prediction is hard. Especially about the future.
"Then it is very interesting to see the projections on nuclear. Lopez et.al. seem to be anti-nuclear, and the IEA do not know how to make heads or tails of it yet."
One can't tell whether the person making predictions is "pro" something or "anti" something, simply by the predictions themselves. A great example of this is my own predictions about nuclear power in the United States.
I *worked* in the nuclear power industry...for the Babcock & Wilcox (B&W) Nuclear Power Division, which designed the nuclear reactor and associated equipment for Three Mile Island. I'm absolutely in strong support of nuclear power, where it makes sense...which is cold, wet places that are fairly densely populated. The U.S. northeast and midwest (e.g., Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, etc.) are perfect examples of great places to build nuclear reactors.
*However*, I also know from my experience at B&W that the industry at that time was hopelessly wrapped up in red tape. I've given the example that the Final Safety Analysis Report (FSAR) for the three B&W Oconee nuclear reactors in South Carolina was about 500 pages long. But the FSAR for the one Midland power plant in Michigan was about 20,000 pages long...and growing...when the plug was pulled on the nuclear reactor, and it was converted to a natural gas power plant.
So if you look at my predictions in 2019 and 2024 versus the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) Annual Energy Outlook (AEO), my nuclear numbers for 2050 are below theirs.
https://markbahner.typepad.com/random_thoughts/2024/05/us-doe-eia-versus-mab2019-and-2024.html
But even there...my numbers came up *substantially* from 2019 to 2024, because, between those years, it seemed clear to me that the U.S. wasn't going to allow the vast majority of the reactors currently operating to shut down by 2050.
So here are the projected electrical energy outputs in 2050, in billions of kilowatt-hours, from EIA-AEO and me (MAB). The predictions were made in 2019 and then in 2024:
EIA-AEO (2019): 672 billion kWh in 2050
MAB (2019): 140 billion kWh in 2050
EIA-AEO (2024): 625 billion kWh in 2050
MAB (2024): 500 billion kWh in 2050
Summary: A prediction doesn't necessarily reflect what one *wants* to happen.
Agreed. One problem I have with this paper.
Thank you for this. A very interesting analysis, I will be reading the paper itself to see what you may or may not have left out :-) I tried my hand at such an anlysis some 10 years agobut never finished it. Good to see someone took the effort.
That said, there is always a bias in these reports towards a politically desired outcome. In recent years we see this in terms of the projected development of the energy mix, where the idea is that some "renewable" energy should take an increasing portion of the mix. This misses the mark consistently as it is more about what some wishes to be true than it is about real life market mechanisms.
In my own line of work, R&D on energy systems for ships, we have had the constant wish for introduction of alternative fuels for the last 10 years. In the real world nothing has changed - shipping is still 99.9% fossil fuels, but the maritime energy outlooks have promoted and emphasized hydrogen, ammonia, methanol and biofuel in that order. The outlooks are more in line with NGOs than they are with the industry. The current, albeit fading, view is that hydrogen is out, ammonia will save the maritime world. The emerging view seems to be that synthetic fuels and biofuels might be significant players. And nuclear lurking in the background.
Ammonia might end up in the "tombstone regulation" boneyard.
Solar photovoltaic capacity addition has exceeded their scenarios because of massive subsidy. However, the trend from a year or so and into the future will look quite different as reality intrudes.
“The IEA has consistently projected rapid growth in nuclear power in its normative scenarios — which would be necessary to achieve rapid rates of decarbonization. However, the real world has trailed all WEO normative scenarios since 2010.”
Hi Roger, isn’t this what we should expect given that the world has not even been close to putting in place the policies required for the normative scenarios?
I very much agree with Robert Graves below. However, I am less charitable than he is. My take on this issue is "I will knowingly lie to the public to support the official narrative, even though all of us scientists know it is false. My funding is more important than the truth." That totally sucks!!!
"The continued and widespread use of RCP8.5 (and the like) remains a scandal of gargantuan proportions in climate science."
This is true, but I suspect the primary reason for it is that the more dramatic the predictions of a climate study, the easier it becomes to get funding for subsequent studies. RCP 8.5's "We're all gonna die" is so much more interesting to largely non-technical readers than RCP 2.6's "there's nothing much to get worried about".
One of the major problems facing academia is the necessity of spending a significant portion of one's mental energy on obtaining funding, as opposed to doing the actual research work that the funding enables.
I also forgot to add, Thank you so much for all you do!
Impeccable timing. Will commit it to memory after a couple more read throughs. Where does economics, women's rights fall in the IPCC subgroups? Are there economics agencies, data collectors besides McKinsey, consultants, world Bank that amass public data? That you trust? Where does population fall into the subgroup context?
Economics is considered within the integrated asset models used to project future emissions and concentrations. Women's rights isn't considered at all, although we can assume that nations were women are privileged (such as Western Europe) will eventually lose population, and the proportion of women living in cultures where women don't have equal rights will increase slightly over time. This however is of no interest to the climate modeling community, which would be more focused on total population living in "energy consumption per capita" buckets.
What's evident to me is that the key missing element in these models is the amount of oil and gas available to be consumed as fuel (oil and gas volumes used for asphalt or plastics are somewhat irrelevant). This is the elephant in the room I have been pointing out for over a decade...we need models to incorporate the inevitable scarcity of fossil fuels and how that would impact third world countries unable to pay the higher prices the oil industry will require to put those fuels on the table.
The most important thing about scenarios is that they need to be plausible and internally consistent.
Instead of 'outlook' and 'normative' I would prefer to distinguish scenarios based on whether they are based on forecasting or backcasting. WEO, but also 'current policies' and 'announced pledges' are forecasts/scenarios and Net Zero Energy scenario is a backcasting scenario.
The best use of scenarios is to sketch diverse and different possible futures. Choices, decisions, policies can then be tested in these different worlds on their impact and effectiveness.
The idea that we can plan the world by backcasting is of course an illusion.
Thank you for this Roger - most interesting. I know this is not the main thrust of the piece, but the IPCC RCP scenarios were mentioned. Is it possible from available temperature data to say which of the scenarios provides a best fit to observations?
I suspect the AR5 RCP6 is closest. One issue we are missing is the lack of assessment of how scenarios and models perform over time. I used to keep spreadsheets showing how they diverged (or didn't), but I eventually found getting the data was becoming more difficult, so I stopped doing it. I limited my comparisons to AR5 because those model runs barely enough time to make comparisons worthwhile.
Thank you - I gather that means a global temperature rise in the region of 3–4 °C by 2100.
Only if additional CO2 has the same warming effect as past additions. If Happer and others are correct, it will not. Given the much higher CO2 levels of the past, there must be some negative feedback mechanism.
My projections include a significant oil price increase after 2035, and a similar natural gas price increase around 2060. These rises lead to lower consumption independent of policy. Unfortunately the oil and gas markets are really hard to predict, so the only thing I can guarantee is that sometime in the future their prices will be a lot higher. For what it's worth my projected temperature anomaly in 2100 is 2.3 C.
Tackling that question is what we took on in this paper:
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac4ebf
The scenario most consistent with observations (of emissions) and near-term energy projections has 2.2C warming in 2100
But that study is already dated. Especially related to population and GDP projections. See this post:
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/take-the-under
Comments welcomed - a few of us are in the early stages of turning that post into a paper for publication
Is the 2.2 C warming projected by 2100 relative to the late 1800s when global surface temperature data begins? I believe we already have more than 1 C since that time.
Thank you Roger!
A scenario is essentially an act of the human imagination. It is presented in the form of an If… Then… statement. The description of this statement in the form of mathematical equations is then mistaken in the media for scientific fact.
These are no internationally recognized and enforced rules about how to judge and disqualify implausible scenarios. Anyone can use or invent any scenario they want, as an advocacy tool. Hence the longevity of RCP 8.5.
Does the inevitable, widespread misuse and misunderstanding of climate scenarios do more harm than good?
AR5 RCP8.5 lives on for political reasons. To see just how poorly designed it was you can take the results from 30 climate models fed RCP8.5 concentrations and compare their atmospheric CO2 concentrations to actual data (depending on the model structure, the model may actually estimate concentrations rather than using the RCP8.5 projection).
There is an art to using scenarios effectively. Shell used to use them heavily and not too badly. They are frequently misused. The most common misuse is to choose a single variable and then create three scenarios, automatically making the middle one look plausible.
I suspect it might be better at the nuke and solar progress on a country by country basis, since countries vary in their access to nuke technology and raw materials, amount of solar radiation likely to be captured, and amount of public funding supporting either industry, as well as other country-specific factors.