"Why is the IPCC spending so much time on a scenario judged unlikely and so little time on a scenario judged in line with current policies? This hasn’t been explained."
It *has* been explained. Many times, by many different people. The IPCC focuses on RCP8.5 and similar scenarios because that's how they make money. Their livelihoods depend on it. The IPCC lies, because liars really do prosper. (It's scientists in subsequent generations who will suffer.)
Not only has it been explained why the IPCC focuses on utterly implausible catastrophic scenarios, people have even proposed solutions. A little more than *15 years* ago, I proposed this potential solution, which I still think is something worth trying:
P.S. What I presented was a concept...it wasn't a "finished product." That is, the money involved, the parameters to be predicted, the participants and other aspects could easily be modified. For example, everything was based on 2029-2031. Those dates could be bumped to 2049-2051, since we've lost 15+ years by not doing anything to try to achieve more honest climate predictions.
I've been on the climate solutions side for decades, and am fully in line with your thoughts on scientific integrity regarding the models et al. Of course whenever I bring up the same questions you do I get the standard "I dont see a Ph.D behind your name" reply, which has some merit. But it's a nagging issue. How do we, as consumers of climate science, make heads or tails of some of climate science's main questions? Things like the differences in scenarios, the deltas between attribution and empirical science, the "relaxed" standards of attribution science, etc. I know it's a loaded question but I'm interested in your perspective. How do we as the public hold scientific claims and science accountable for what's being communicated?
Where exactly did the IPCC ever claim 8.5 was the business as usual scenario? When they first came out, it was pretty clear to me that was the worst case scenario. Some people later claimed it was business as usual, but I never saw any official statement to that effect.
It was called "business as usual" in the original Riahi et al. paper. Then IPCC AR5 identified it as the "reference" scenario. Long story told here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2020.101890 (let me know if access is an issue)
Perhaps a summary of 4.5 would help. Especially since it is the most likely according to IPCC rather than 8.5 which even though extremely unlikely they talk most about.
Agreed. Though under current policies the 4.5 scenarios are more accurately described as upper end or worst case. Our recent work suggests that a central scenario based off of current trends and near-term projections is SSP2-3.4 which no one ever discusses. See: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac4ebf
Most people identified RCP 8.5 as an extreme, or worst case, scenario from the start. It was later that someone claimed it was the business as usual scenario. Most of the analyses I saw identified RCP 4.5 as the business as usual scenario, even though most modeling exercises used rcp 8.5. I would love to see an analysis to determine if RCP 8.5 is even physically possible at this point. My sense is that it is not.
I agree 100% that there is no likelihood of immediate risk for billions of people. There is a likelihood for increased flooding and displacement fort tens to hundreds of millions of people over the next two generations or so and more by the year 2100, but that is not immediate.
The claim that "the world is headed" for a low carbon future is extremely optimistic and not borne out by the evidence so far. So far, we have blown through the median IPCC estimate for CO^2 emissions every time. While the EU has mostly met its climate change goals, no one else has. The US has modestly decreased GHG emissions and China and India have massively increased theirs, though their per capita usage is still a fraction of the US emissions.
Staring at these graphs of carbon emission historically, it would take a real pollyannaish attitude to expect GHG emissions to start declining anytime soon:
China, India and Africa will all continue to increase their carbon emissions. There is no reason that they should have a standard of living lower than in the West. New technologies will probably help as time goes on but they obviously not being implemented fast enough today.
Interesting. I did do this twice already - I went for the source the panicking masses, journalists and gov told me they used and found out that the panic is not justified. Years ago I went on to read IPCC report myself. I got to the similar conclusions - especially after studying the science of modelling the weather/climate. Last year September 2020 I took a yearly reports of flu season prepared by the government agency called RKI (I live in Germany). I ready it and concluded that this and other more current reports do not justify their own experts opinions used to produce the gov. policies.
My conclusion on that is - the gov. still will try to have a reliable basic research in order to see where they are but they will reinterpret this for public consumption in order to reach own goals that have nothing to do with these that they claim they have (or else they would not be cutting down all the forests in Germany to build windparks).
I am sure there are other examples, big and small, in all other Western democracies. IPCC and Covid are two global 'emergencies' where panic and hysteria flooded us all.
Let us hope we find our ways. So far I do not see it here in Germany - they pull the plug on all the nuclear, coal and gas burning power stations w/o having anything to replace these in case of no sun + no wind situation and at the same time promoting electric cars which (surprise surprise!) use electricity. I wonder how this will go.
IPCC proposed banishment of fossil fuels would place most of the world’s population at risk. The oil derivatives and fuel manufactured from oil were the main reasons the world populated to 8 billion.
Fossil fuels are the gift to mankind that has allowed the healthy and wealthy countries to achieve prosperous growth, but the IPCC avoidance of the benefits to society, and just focusing on the negatives is irresponsible.
Great Job! My greatest fear is that media and governments will try to use this to justify government intervention in the global economy, doing untold damage to the Developing World. During the pandemic between 90 and 120 million people in the developing world have been plunged back into absolute poverty (living on less than $1.90 a day). This has not been caused by restriction or COVID itself, but rather the economic slowdown seen throughout the West- the loss of the export markets which they rely upon to sell their goods, and keep themselves buoyed from the most abject circumstances.
This is not to say that we should not act on climate change- far from it- the best thing Western governments could do (other than perhaps massively rebuilding their nuclear capacity) would be to honour the commitments they made at Paris to fund green innovation, but instead we get the same old tired solar and wind prescriptions which, being generous, have a contribution to make, but are simply incapable of acting as substitutes for fossil fuel power generation at anywhere near the scale necessary.
Once you know nuclear is on the CO2 bandwagon, the IPCC propaganda all falls into place. They are already partnered with the IAEA, and neither party is honest broker in the energy debate.
The IPCC are just one more agency to be compromised by the UN's lust for nuclear and bio weapons. The WHO, another UN agency were infiltrated and gagged by the WHA-1240 agreement with the IAEA way back in the 1950s, and today, IRENA, the renewables agency has adopted the IAEA's MESSAGE protocol, which forbids energy planning without reference to nuclear power.
The governments are going to keep doing fuck all about climate change no matter the risks. Its going to be interesting when the hundreds of millions of people living in the middle East and north africa, who already suffer the driest period in 900 years, run out of water completely. Bye bye Europe.
Do you have a link for those droughts? The last time I heard of droughts in Africa was Malawi, and when I checked this out, the rainfall turned out to be quite normal. There was one drought, however, but it was several decades long and in the early 1800s, long before warming even started - and when the world had not yet emerged from the LIA. Australian droughts occurred when sea temperatures in the Indian Ocean were *cold*, and the worst droughts in modern history in the US were back in the 1930s. Even in the UK, once again, the worst modern drought came in 1976 after a long period of cooling following the war (despite exponential increases in CO2 emissions, by the way), so this is a complex subject. Warm does not always equal drought, because the world is 70% ocean, and we soft-of need heat to create rain! It's not just me. Even Hulme of the IPCC/University of East Anglia has come out against climate change causing droughts. Unsurprising, as there never was a period in history without them. Of course, plants resist drought better when there is more CO2 around. You can Google all this.
You should really program you YouTube to offer you some good content on climate change engineering projects. There really is a lot to be positive about. The dry period you refer to may indeed be subject to AGW, but it also a product of the far longer cycle of glacial and interglacial periods. One of the main reasons why Rome (and it's successors) fell, was because previously abundant North African colonies experienced significant, systemic climatic and long-term decline in water supplies.
On the subject of Middle Eastern and North African water shortages, you should look up How to Turn Sea Water Into Fresh Water Without Pollution by Terra Mater. It details the NEOM project currently being undertaken by Saudi Arabia, and shows the work being done by Solar Water in association with Cranfield University in the UK. It could represent a major future reduction in Carbon Footprints through desalination.
Transparency and honesty about what the science really says is core to our future. It is regrettable that the media have lost interest in understanding reality and truth in favour of headlines that sell well.
I think I read IPCC SREX (2012) on extreme events because of something you wrote - perhaps it was the time of "the terror" among the climate faithful when you were appointed as the climate writer for 538. A briefly held position, but educational for many reasons.
It's been bizarre ever since to read the certainty by the media and politicians that droughts, floods and storms are getting worse.
When I explain to the (small group of) people I know that the IPCC report said something completely different they nod in interest. Once more than a few weeks has passed, if the subject of climate comes up, they usually comment that I "don't believe climate scientists", or "don't believe in climate change".
Perhaps a fascinating study in human psychology - "propaganda only happens to other people" - but I appreciate you putting the effort in and making yourself likely unemployable at any other academic establishment from your current one as a result.
The sixth fold per capita increase in coal use leaves me asking - what population estimate was used?
"Why is the IPCC spending so much time on a scenario judged unlikely and so little time on a scenario judged in line with current policies? This hasn’t been explained."
It *has* been explained. Many times, by many different people. The IPCC focuses on RCP8.5 and similar scenarios because that's how they make money. Their livelihoods depend on it. The IPCC lies, because liars really do prosper. (It's scientists in subsequent generations who will suffer.)
Not only has it been explained why the IPCC focuses on utterly implausible catastrophic scenarios, people have even proposed solutions. A little more than *15 years* ago, I proposed this potential solution, which I still think is something worth trying:
https://markbahner.typepad.com/random_thoughts/2007/01/a_method_for_ac.html
P.S. What I presented was a concept...it wasn't a "finished product." That is, the money involved, the parameters to be predicted, the participants and other aspects could easily be modified. For example, everything was based on 2029-2031. Those dates could be bumped to 2049-2051, since we've lost 15+ years by not doing anything to try to achieve more honest climate predictions.
I've been on the climate solutions side for decades, and am fully in line with your thoughts on scientific integrity regarding the models et al. Of course whenever I bring up the same questions you do I get the standard "I dont see a Ph.D behind your name" reply, which has some merit. But it's a nagging issue. How do we, as consumers of climate science, make heads or tails of some of climate science's main questions? Things like the differences in scenarios, the deltas between attribution and empirical science, the "relaxed" standards of attribution science, etc. I know it's a loaded question but I'm interested in your perspective. How do we as the public hold scientific claims and science accountable for what's being communicated?
Where exactly did the IPCC ever claim 8.5 was the business as usual scenario? When they first came out, it was pretty clear to me that was the worst case scenario. Some people later claimed it was business as usual, but I never saw any official statement to that effect.
It was called "business as usual" in the original Riahi et al. paper. Then IPCC AR5 identified it as the "reference" scenario. Long story told here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2020.101890 (let me know if access is an issue)
Perhaps a summary of 4.5 would help. Especially since it is the most likely according to IPCC rather than 8.5 which even though extremely unlikely they talk most about.
Agreed. Though under current policies the 4.5 scenarios are more accurately described as upper end or worst case. Our recent work suggests that a central scenario based off of current trends and near-term projections is SSP2-3.4 which no one ever discusses. See: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac4ebf
is your email address for tips the same as the your substack email address that acknowledges subscriptions.
?
Feel free to use rpielkejr at gmail
Most people identified RCP 8.5 as an extreme, or worst case, scenario from the start. It was later that someone claimed it was the business as usual scenario. Most of the analyses I saw identified RCP 4.5 as the business as usual scenario, even though most modeling exercises used rcp 8.5. I would love to see an analysis to determine if RCP 8.5 is even physically possible at this point. My sense is that it is not.
I agree 100% that there is no likelihood of immediate risk for billions of people. There is a likelihood for increased flooding and displacement fort tens to hundreds of millions of people over the next two generations or so and more by the year 2100, but that is not immediate.
The claim that "the world is headed" for a low carbon future is extremely optimistic and not borne out by the evidence so far. So far, we have blown through the median IPCC estimate for CO^2 emissions every time. While the EU has mostly met its climate change goals, no one else has. The US has modestly decreased GHG emissions and China and India have massively increased theirs, though their per capita usage is still a fraction of the US emissions.
Staring at these graphs of carbon emission historically, it would take a real pollyannaish attitude to expect GHG emissions to start declining anytime soon:
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
China, India and Africa will all continue to increase their carbon emissions. There is no reason that they should have a standard of living lower than in the West. New technologies will probably help as time goes on but they obviously not being implemented fast enough today.
Interesting. I did do this twice already - I went for the source the panicking masses, journalists and gov told me they used and found out that the panic is not justified. Years ago I went on to read IPCC report myself. I got to the similar conclusions - especially after studying the science of modelling the weather/climate. Last year September 2020 I took a yearly reports of flu season prepared by the government agency called RKI (I live in Germany). I ready it and concluded that this and other more current reports do not justify their own experts opinions used to produce the gov. policies.
My conclusion on that is - the gov. still will try to have a reliable basic research in order to see where they are but they will reinterpret this for public consumption in order to reach own goals that have nothing to do with these that they claim they have (or else they would not be cutting down all the forests in Germany to build windparks).
I am sure there are other examples, big and small, in all other Western democracies. IPCC and Covid are two global 'emergencies' where panic and hysteria flooded us all.
Let us hope we find our ways. So far I do not see it here in Germany - they pull the plug on all the nuclear, coal and gas burning power stations w/o having anything to replace these in case of no sun + no wind situation and at the same time promoting electric cars which (surprise surprise!) use electricity. I wonder how this will go.
IPCC proposed banishment of fossil fuels would place most of the world’s population at risk. The oil derivatives and fuel manufactured from oil were the main reasons the world populated to 8 billion.
Fossil fuels are the gift to mankind that has allowed the healthy and wealthy countries to achieve prosperous growth, but the IPCC avoidance of the benefits to society, and just focusing on the negatives is irresponsible.
https://www.eurasiareview.com/19082021-ipcc-proposed-banishment-of-fossil-fuels-would-place-most-of-worlds-population-at-risk-oped/
Great Job! My greatest fear is that media and governments will try to use this to justify government intervention in the global economy, doing untold damage to the Developing World. During the pandemic between 90 and 120 million people in the developing world have been plunged back into absolute poverty (living on less than $1.90 a day). This has not been caused by restriction or COVID itself, but rather the economic slowdown seen throughout the West- the loss of the export markets which they rely upon to sell their goods, and keep themselves buoyed from the most abject circumstances.
This is not to say that we should not act on climate change- far from it- the best thing Western governments could do (other than perhaps massively rebuilding their nuclear capacity) would be to honour the commitments they made at Paris to fund green innovation, but instead we get the same old tired solar and wind prescriptions which, being generous, have a contribution to make, but are simply incapable of acting as substitutes for fossil fuel power generation at anywhere near the scale necessary.
Rebuilding nuclear capacity is already in progress, but it won't help with either CO2 or climate changes - https://www.ieer.org/pubs/index.html#techrpts
Once you know nuclear is on the CO2 bandwagon, the IPCC propaganda all falls into place. They are already partnered with the IAEA, and neither party is honest broker in the energy debate.
The IPCC are just one more agency to be compromised by the UN's lust for nuclear and bio weapons. The WHO, another UN agency were infiltrated and gagged by the WHA-1240 agreement with the IAEA way back in the 1950s, and today, IRENA, the renewables agency has adopted the IAEA's MESSAGE protocol, which forbids energy planning without reference to nuclear power.
https://independentwho.org/en/
The governments are going to keep doing fuck all about climate change no matter the risks. Its going to be interesting when the hundreds of millions of people living in the middle East and north africa, who already suffer the driest period in 900 years, run out of water completely. Bye bye Europe.
Do you have a link for those droughts? The last time I heard of droughts in Africa was Malawi, and when I checked this out, the rainfall turned out to be quite normal. There was one drought, however, but it was several decades long and in the early 1800s, long before warming even started - and when the world had not yet emerged from the LIA. Australian droughts occurred when sea temperatures in the Indian Ocean were *cold*, and the worst droughts in modern history in the US were back in the 1930s. Even in the UK, once again, the worst modern drought came in 1976 after a long period of cooling following the war (despite exponential increases in CO2 emissions, by the way), so this is a complex subject. Warm does not always equal drought, because the world is 70% ocean, and we soft-of need heat to create rain! It's not just me. Even Hulme of the IPCC/University of East Anglia has come out against climate change causing droughts. Unsurprising, as there never was a period in history without them. Of course, plants resist drought better when there is more CO2 around. You can Google all this.
You should really program you YouTube to offer you some good content on climate change engineering projects. There really is a lot to be positive about. The dry period you refer to may indeed be subject to AGW, but it also a product of the far longer cycle of glacial and interglacial periods. One of the main reasons why Rome (and it's successors) fell, was because previously abundant North African colonies experienced significant, systemic climatic and long-term decline in water supplies.
On the subject of Middle Eastern and North African water shortages, you should look up How to Turn Sea Water Into Fresh Water Without Pollution by Terra Mater. It details the NEOM project currently being undertaken by Saudi Arabia, and shows the work being done by Solar Water in association with Cranfield University in the UK. It could represent a major future reduction in Carbon Footprints through desalination.
Transparency and honesty about what the science really says is core to our future. It is regrettable that the media have lost interest in understanding reality and truth in favour of headlines that sell well.
I think I read IPCC SREX (2012) on extreme events because of something you wrote - perhaps it was the time of "the terror" among the climate faithful when you were appointed as the climate writer for 538. A briefly held position, but educational for many reasons.
It's been bizarre ever since to read the certainty by the media and politicians that droughts, floods and storms are getting worse.
When I explain to the (small group of) people I know that the IPCC report said something completely different they nod in interest. Once more than a few weeks has passed, if the subject of climate comes up, they usually comment that I "don't believe climate scientists", or "don't believe in climate change".
Perhaps a fascinating study in human psychology - "propaganda only happens to other people" - but I appreciate you putting the effort in and making yourself likely unemployable at any other academic establishment from your current one as a result.