A tangential question from a fan: Is anyone looking at what people (including decision makers) think is going to happen the day that we hit "net zero" (or some key milestone on the way to that objective)? My understanding is that essentially nothing will change that day, except that we will start down the multi-decade long curve that we have been riding up since about the end of WW2, with positive effects over time but no dramatic changes. How should those making climate assessments be asked to think about that period?
This is nitpicky, but why doesn't your link to your X feed comments take you directly to your comments on NCA? I was interested to read more detail, but I gave up after scrolling through endless reposts and Buffalo football stuff.
Strange - I get directed to your main page. Maybe it's because I'm in China now and using a VPN; maybe that screws with the link. Thanks for sending the direct link.
Reading the NCA's response to your comment reminded me of a conversation I once had with a friend at the Corps of Engineers who had spent many years dealing with the public. He said there are five generic responses to public comments: it sucks to be us; it sucks to be you; bullshit; noted; and we'll pray for you.
I think NCA's response of "does not fit" falls into that third category.
Surprise surprise. The federal government is bought and paid for by NGOs funded by lefty philanthropists who don't live like they believe anything they financially support. Americans' control over their own economies are being undermined, government has become a corrupt participant in king making in the climate idiot olympics, the energy economy is becoming a controlled one rather than market driven, etc. And all of this looks like mutual self-pleasuring between NGOs, federal agency flunkies, and corporate chiefs who know which side of their green energy bread is buttered.
Dear Roger, I wrote a letter to the Wall Street Journal requesting a correction to their article in yesterday's paper. This article parroted the National Climate Assessment uncritically to claim that extreme weather events are increasing and, at present, are putting food supplies and our "way of life" in peril. I used your data to show that floods, hurricanes and tornadoes are not doing any such thing. Wildfires are down over 90% since the 1930's, and this year's bountiful corn crop set a new record for bushels harvested. I plan to keep protesting about such claptrap. But sometimes, the torrent of climate scare stories has reached such a volume that I feel like a man with a teaspoon trying to turn back the tide at the Bay of Fundy.
I was working in federal R&D when our representative came back from a USCGRP meeting and said something like “ there’s going to be big bucks, bigger than we’ve ever seen” and being R&D folks we said “but everything has some relationship to climate” visions of dollar signs dancing in our heads. And pretty soon every proposal had climate somewhere.. and so I wonder, because most scientists who get funded by climate megabucks are not modelers, if that’s part of the reason 8.5 was accepted and folks can’t let go; that most climate research needs projections and most groups are not able to generate their own (nor downscale). It’s not exactly “corruption” on the part of scientists, they need to go where the money is.. but the path from “lotsa bucks” to “shifts in research direction” to “climate affects everything” to a way of looking at the world that can’t be questioned.. even in its tiniest part (see your work, even the recent Patrick Brown kerfuffle) looking back looks kind of inevitable. A kingdom built on projections with the king disciplines being modelers and the rest of us toiling in their fields. But I’m thinking big infusions of bucks to USCGRP is where it all started.
Sharon: I have very much appreciated your comments over time. I think above you touched on a point I have made: that most climate scientists work on small parts of the problem and don't see the big picture, so lacking the ability to generate their own, they cling to the worst scenarios because that generates the bucks. I recently created a short paper that calculates the future CO2 concentration and global average temperature year by year for a set of arbitrarily drawn but cohesive curves of emissions from 2015 to 2100. It is parallel in some ways to the 2023 IPCC report, but much more concise, clearer, and the range of future emission scenarios seems to me to make more sense. If you want a copy send request to drdrapp@earthlink.net
This is all too familiar. Back in the mid-80's AIDS epidemic Congress mandated $5 billion to be spent on AIDS research every year. Biologists everywhere rewrote their grant proposals to somehow be related to AIDS [HIV]. My favorite was a group of salamander sex behavior researchers that got AIDS funding.
Policy based "science" will destroy whats left of the trust by the public in the scientific method.
Roger should have a annual competition for "proposals with the most tenuous relationship to the grant topic" . I'm afraid that all the baseball, wine, diseases projected in 50 years would be overwhelming. Or maybe each research grant panel (one of my former jobs was organizing them) should have 1) a potential user of the info and 2) a devil's advocate.
"There is no need for these conflicts of interest to play such a prominent role in the report’s authorship, but they perhaps explain some of its errors." Way too nice to those who have approached criminal malfeasance so closely.
Judith Curry was professor at Georgia Institute of Technology. She is a world-class expert on many aspects of climate change, particularly sea level. She drew a lot of fire for her doubts regarding climate extremism. Finally, she quit and started her own company to advise commerce and industry regarding impacts of climate change. Businesses with lots of money at stake want to hear the real skinny, not the false alarmism pushed by the agencies. I hope she is doing well - I am not connected.
Roger: My advice! Instead of collecting 80 bucks a year from folks like me, and putting your stuff out for free, start your own company and advise corporations on how they should adapt to climate change. Make the big bucks?
IIRC, Judith Curry has said that in her situation the income-maximizing move would have been to stay at Georgia Tech and get with the program. That's from a youtube replay of one of her podcast interviews on her latest book. (Which, BTW, everybody should buy.)
Was that tongue in cheek? I think Roger is doing what is absolutely essential, presenting legitimate points of view and research that others shove under the rug.
Thanks for coming to Montrose and sharing your work. Could you send the slide deck that you used? I'm sure that I had seen some of the charts in your blog but it was a nice collection in one place!
could you make this available to all of us followers of your posts? Thank you.
With all due respect to Mr. Rapp, though his idea may be tempting I would hate to lose access to your knowledge of climate change and its policy ramifications.
A tangential question from a fan: Is anyone looking at what people (including decision makers) think is going to happen the day that we hit "net zero" (or some key milestone on the way to that objective)? My understanding is that essentially nothing will change that day, except that we will start down the multi-decade long curve that we have been riding up since about the end of WW2, with positive effects over time but no dramatic changes. How should those making climate assessments be asked to think about that period?
This is nitpicky, but why doesn't your link to your X feed comments take you directly to your comments on NCA? I was interested to read more detail, but I gave up after scrolling through endless reposts and Buffalo football stuff.
That’s odd
My link goes right to here https://x.com/rogerpielkejr/status/1724790110770843913?s=46&t=WMSRPCBBWz_Ojw7zB5V3AA
Any others having a problem?
Strange - I get directed to your main page. Maybe it's because I'm in China now and using a VPN; maybe that screws with the link. Thanks for sending the direct link.
Or maybe just Elon’s continuing war on Substack🤷♂️
Reading the NCA's response to your comment reminded me of a conversation I once had with a friend at the Corps of Engineers who had spent many years dealing with the public. He said there are five generic responses to public comments: it sucks to be us; it sucks to be you; bullshit; noted; and we'll pray for you.
I think NCA's response of "does not fit" falls into that third category.
Perhaps the problem lies in incentives.
Tax funding and publication quotas naturally leads to politicisation and a higher quantity of papers of lower quality.
Scientists should be funded by those seeking the truth. Lower but honest funding would lead to lower quantity and higher quality.
Surprise surprise. The federal government is bought and paid for by NGOs funded by lefty philanthropists who don't live like they believe anything they financially support. Americans' control over their own economies are being undermined, government has become a corrupt participant in king making in the climate idiot olympics, the energy economy is becoming a controlled one rather than market driven, etc. And all of this looks like mutual self-pleasuring between NGOs, federal agency flunkies, and corporate chiefs who know which side of their green energy bread is buttered.
The NGO grift is emerging as one of the greatest threats to global freedom.
Dear Roger, I wrote a letter to the Wall Street Journal requesting a correction to their article in yesterday's paper. This article parroted the National Climate Assessment uncritically to claim that extreme weather events are increasing and, at present, are putting food supplies and our "way of life" in peril. I used your data to show that floods, hurricanes and tornadoes are not doing any such thing. Wildfires are down over 90% since the 1930's, and this year's bountiful corn crop set a new record for bushels harvested. I plan to keep protesting about such claptrap. But sometimes, the torrent of climate scare stories has reached such a volume that I feel like a man with a teaspoon trying to turn back the tide at the Bay of Fundy.
I was working in federal R&D when our representative came back from a USCGRP meeting and said something like “ there’s going to be big bucks, bigger than we’ve ever seen” and being R&D folks we said “but everything has some relationship to climate” visions of dollar signs dancing in our heads. And pretty soon every proposal had climate somewhere.. and so I wonder, because most scientists who get funded by climate megabucks are not modelers, if that’s part of the reason 8.5 was accepted and folks can’t let go; that most climate research needs projections and most groups are not able to generate their own (nor downscale). It’s not exactly “corruption” on the part of scientists, they need to go where the money is.. but the path from “lotsa bucks” to “shifts in research direction” to “climate affects everything” to a way of looking at the world that can’t be questioned.. even in its tiniest part (see your work, even the recent Patrick Brown kerfuffle) looking back looks kind of inevitable. A kingdom built on projections with the king disciplines being modelers and the rest of us toiling in their fields. But I’m thinking big infusions of bucks to USCGRP is where it all started.
Sharon: I have very much appreciated your comments over time. I think above you touched on a point I have made: that most climate scientists work on small parts of the problem and don't see the big picture, so lacking the ability to generate their own, they cling to the worst scenarios because that generates the bucks. I recently created a short paper that calculates the future CO2 concentration and global average temperature year by year for a set of arbitrarily drawn but cohesive curves of emissions from 2015 to 2100. It is parallel in some ways to the 2023 IPCC report, but much more concise, clearer, and the range of future emission scenarios seems to me to make more sense. If you want a copy send request to drdrapp@earthlink.net
Exactly as Eisenhower warned us.
This is all too familiar. Back in the mid-80's AIDS epidemic Congress mandated $5 billion to be spent on AIDS research every year. Biologists everywhere rewrote their grant proposals to somehow be related to AIDS [HIV]. My favorite was a group of salamander sex behavior researchers that got AIDS funding.
Policy based "science" will destroy whats left of the trust by the public in the scientific method.
Roger should have a annual competition for "proposals with the most tenuous relationship to the grant topic" . I'm afraid that all the baseball, wine, diseases projected in 50 years would be overwhelming. Or maybe each research grant panel (one of my former jobs was organizing them) should have 1) a potential user of the info and 2) a devil's advocate.
Another example of what a 5 ton Gadfly can do.
"There is no need for these conflicts of interest to play such a prominent role in the report’s authorship, but they perhaps explain some of its errors." Way too nice to those who have approached criminal malfeasance so closely.
Judith Curry was professor at Georgia Institute of Technology. She is a world-class expert on many aspects of climate change, particularly sea level. She drew a lot of fire for her doubts regarding climate extremism. Finally, she quit and started her own company to advise commerce and industry regarding impacts of climate change. Businesses with lots of money at stake want to hear the real skinny, not the false alarmism pushed by the agencies. I hope she is doing well - I am not connected.
Roger: My advice! Instead of collecting 80 bucks a year from folks like me, and putting your stuff out for free, start your own company and advise corporations on how they should adapt to climate change. Make the big bucks?
IIRC, Judith Curry has said that in her situation the income-maximizing move would have been to stay at Georgia Tech and get with the program. That's from a youtube replay of one of her podcast interviews on her latest book. (Which, BTW, everybody should buy.)
Was that tongue in cheek? I think Roger is doing what is absolutely essential, presenting legitimate points of view and research that others shove under the rug.
Thanks for coming to Montrose and sharing your work. Could you send the slide deck that you used? I'm sure that I had seen some of the charts in your blog but it was a nice collection in one place!
Absolutely, can you send me an email request? Just respond to this post in your in box and it'll get to me. Thakns!
could you make this available to all of us followers of your posts? Thank you.
With all due respect to Mr. Rapp, though his idea may be tempting I would hate to lose access to your knowledge of climate change and its policy ramifications.