Pielke's Weekly Memo #11

A starter set of essential slides for understanding climate science, impacts and policy

Looking down on Ålesund, Norway.

Greetings from Oslo! We have successfully arrived here in Norway and today I am getting set up at the University. More on that to come.

In this week’s memo I am providing a “starter set” of 10 figures that I recommend everyone have in their set of slides on climate change, whether you are a climate researcher, a journalist or just an interested reader. I literally have 1,000s of images, graphs, tables and figures that I use in research, teaching, writing and more. Coming up with a top 10 is an impossible task, but we have to start somewhere. so I expect I’ll add to these down the line.

My criteria for including these 10 slides include a focus on the issues that I am asked about most, the things that most people are not really aware of related to climate and some key framing issues that will be useful in getting into more detail and specificity in future installments.

If you have comments, suggestions or requests, please just let me know and I’ll be happy to respond.

Here is what this post includes:

• Three slides for everyone

• Seven additional slides for paid subscribers

• A downloadable PPT file with all ten slides for paid subscribers.

Here is what the ten slides focus on:

1. How do we know that accumulating carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels is heating the earth?

2. What are trends in global consumption of fossil fuels (expressed in exajoules)?

3. What is an exajoule of energy consumption?

4. How much carbon-free (fossil fuel-free) energy supply is needed to displace fossil fuels?

5. On current policies, what are the current (2022) best estimates of future carbon dioxide emissions?

6. On current policies, what are the current (2022) best estimates of global average surface temperature change in 2100?

7. How has the incidence of hurricanes changed over the past 50 years?

8. What are trends in overall weather and climate disaster losses as a percent of GDP?

9. What changes have been observed in the number of people who die in and are affected by weather and climate disasters?

10. What extreme weather phenomena does the IPCC assert to have changed in global incidence (detection) and as a result of human-caused climate changes (attribution)?

Here are the first three, with brief annotations:

How do we know that accumulating carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels is heating the earth?

Credit for this one goes to my father, Roger Pielke Sr., who many decades ago argued that ocean heat content was a far better place to identify global warming than was the surface temperature record. As shown above, there is no doubt that oceans have been warming and carbon dioxide emissions are a primary cause (for details see the IPCC). There are of course other reasons (human and non-human) that results in changes to climate, like aerosol pollution, land use, other greenhouse gases and more. But there is no doubt, as my father told me in the 1980s (as far back as I can recall!), that carbon dioxide emissions are a “primary climate forcing.”

What are trends in global consumption of fossil fuels (expressed in exajoules)?

These data are from the latest BP Statistical Review of World Energy. I use the report extensively in my classes on energy policy, and a whole semester can be spent exploring it in detail. One key feature of the graph above is the overwhelming presence of fossil fuels (green, orange and grey in the stacked chart above left) in our global energy supply. A huge challenge for understanding such charts is to appreciate the magnitude of energy scale.

What is an exajoule of energy consumption?

All of my energy policy classes start out with developing an understanding of units and scale. In energy there are lots of units and a mind-bogglingly massive scale of energy production and consumption. The annotated graphic above comes from Our World in Data (a fantastic resource). You’ll have to zoom in to fully appreciate it (and you can see the original here). In my annotation I have attempted to show how different modes of electricity generation (e.g., hydro, nuclear, wind solar, gas, etc.) can be equated with the abstract “exajoule” presented in the previous figure. In class we spend weeks on this, so I know it is challenging to convey in a single figure. Let me know what you think.