Fascinating piece. I'd only quibble with the phrase "low cost renewables".
There is no such thing. Renewables (wind/solar) are cheap to operate (no fuel costs), but not cheap to build, their unreliability imposes costs on the grid (hidden by tax credits), and their short life incurs expensive decommissioning and replacement costs.
Thanks. I look forward to your paper. Your piece here makes a great set of points. BTW, I have made similar arguments in class on the course , Energy and Civilization, I co-teach at UC Berkeley. Perhaps, you and I can chat someday soon. Thanks again for helping to raise awareness on a key topic of our times.
Thank you, sir. This is an outstanding and thought-provoking essay. Several comments/thoughts/suggestions.
Your definition of “adaption” is spot-on. It should be framed and sent in big, bold letters to Messers Gore and Dessler. That said, I would suggest you add a similar definition of “mitigation.” You attempt to provide some comparisons (efficiency, renewables), but those comparisons do not clearly define what “climate mitigation” means.
You state early in your essay that “[m]itigation remains a crucial long-term goal for society—the Earth will continue to warm until emissions reach net zero.” I would submit that this is a statement of opinion, not fact. In fact, we have no evidence suggesting mitigation will “stop” warming, no do we have any idea what the earth will do whether emissions continue or cease. We can only surmise, based on geologic history. That history suggests that because the earth has in fact been warmer, it could easily continue to warm.
You argue that adaption is the dominant driver in outcomes. In fact, adaption and development have been the ONLY means of improving long-term outcomes of crop yields, damages and death rates from extreme weather, and long-term life expectancy and health improvements. You have observed in previous posts that never in history has mankind been safer from extreme weather and climate. Can you point to any single "mitigation" strategy that has allowed us to reach this point? It is true that adaption has created risks, evidenced by a warming planet, but it is only human arrogance that gives rise to the belief that humans can in fact control geologic and cosmic processes that influence our environment.
Andy May has written that Andy May has written that “the climate debate ‘is not whether humans influence the climate, the debate is over how much we contribute and whether the additional warming is dangerous.’”
I believe your conclusions are exactly correct, but that the implications are incomplete. Respectfully, here is where the paper falls short of its potential. In truth, “economic development” has been only the apparent driver, but in fact the real driver has been energy – the increased availability of reliable, efficient, and practical energy sources. In my humble opinions, any attempts to master our climate must be met first with a complete mastery of our energy sources.
Towards the end of your essay, you state “Take note however that this conclusion does not mean that reducing emissions makes no sense. To the contrary, we argue that to be effective mitigation policies should learn lessons from successes in adaptation — notably the alignment of the time and space scales of costs and benefits.” Frankly, I’m not sure what to think of these statements. They seem to be kowtowing to the current political atmosphere that cancels any opinion contrary to the consensus. What makes “sense” is the continued improvement in energy development – that is, moving from less dense to more dense power sources.
IF we accept the premise that the economy is a derivative of energy, then to improve that economy we must improve the efficiency of our energy use, not policies directed at adaption or mitigation, per se. Indeed, if we are to improve our climate sensitive outcomes, it must be driven by better, more reliable and more affordable energy.
I am looking forward to your thoughts on the Endangerment Finding. Thank you again for your great work.
Since Roger invited comments, I would like to add a more precise comment on this puzzling statement: “the Earth will continue to warm until emissions reach net zero”. This is nothing less than a return to the “hockey stick” fraud, and could as well have been written by Michael Mann. The statement implies not only that ALL climate warming is anthropogenic, but also that there are no natural factors that might cause the climate to warm in the absence of human use of fossil fuels . According to these authors, if human activity would just cease (“net zero”), the Earth’s climate would return to some kind of stable state - the flat part of the infamous hockey stick. Are Burgess et al even aware of Milankovich cyclicity or variable solar activity, to mention just a couple of many natural factors that impact Earth’s climate in the short term, causing climate events such as the Medieval Optimum or the subsequent Little Ice Age? Why would the authors blow up their scientific credibility with such an absurd statement? Is this a requirement in order to publish in the (in)famous peer-reviewed system?
“The statement implies not only that ALL climate warming is anthropogenic, but also that there are no natural factors that might cause the climate to warm in the absence of human use of fossil fuels.”
No climate scientist would sign on to this claim. I doubt you could find a single climate scientist (operating at a university) who isn’t familiar with the Earth’s natural temperature forcings.
You seem to also be blissfully unaware of the fact that while climate scientists must know of natural temperature forcings, there are extremely few papers published on this topic and the general trend is to ignore them. Might that have something to do with the fact that if you choose to study natural factors you are unlikely to get funding and then to get published, and eventually end up as an outcast? Or maybe you are also unaware of this as well? You should read more of Roger’s posts on this topic. Although for a slightly different reason, he also became an outcast.
"Global temperature leaped more than 0.4°C (0.7°F) during the past two years, the 12-month average peaking in August 2024 at +1.6°C relative to the temperature at the beginning of last century (the 1880-1920 average). This temperature jump was spurred by one of the periodic tropical El Niño warming events, but many Earth scientists were baffled by the magnitude of the global warming, which was twice as large as expected for the weak 2023-2024 El Niño. We find that most of the other half of the warming was caused by a restriction on aerosol emissions by ships, which was imposed in 2020 by the International Maritime Organization to combat the effect of aerosol pollutants on human health." And that's just a fraction of the factors discussed in the paper.
Doesn't that mean that aerosol emissions negate the warming effects of the CO2 emissions from ships? What about coal and oil-fired power-generating stations? Ship emissions are dwarfed by the emissions of coal and oil-fired power generation.
Scientific papers like this often boldly predict the temperature effects of atmospheric forcing as if that is easy to do. Never mind that most model predictions prove to be very wrong. To my knowledge, no scientist has discovered (and validated) a way to directly measure the temperature effect of a specific atmospheric forcing, isolated from other factors that affect temperature. If you can't do that, how do you know it's true?
This paper is a positive development notwithstanding the unsubstantiated claim that the “Earth will continue to warm until emissions reach net zero”. You have previously detailed how difficult, if not impossible, net zero is, both here at THB and in the “Climate Fix”.
I’ll refrain from further comments until I’ve had time to study the report in more detail, but my initial reaction is to flag the continued dissonance between the level of economic development proposed here and the more modest development trajectories assumed in the frequently cited´and currently tracked IPCC emissions scenarios. Raising per capita emissions in Africa alone to something like 3 metric tons of CO₂ per year would put pressure on those scenarios in ways I wonder if they are designed to accommodate.
It also feels convenient to lean on technological advances that were arguably driven into existence by an - perhaps overzealous - mitigation strategy in order to justify a more adaptation-centric approach.
It feels very similar to when Lomborg is embraced by politicians who've clearly demonstrated that they are absolutely not willing to commit to the level of R&D he recommends.
Finally, referring to the Gates memo as “maligned” strikes me as unnecessary and needlessly confrontational.
Like almost everyone, you must have missed Al Gore's 2013 book, "The Future," with his mea culpa for that 1992 attack on adaptation. His revised view? Those resisting action on emissions were wrong to tout adaptation alone, Gore wrote. But he said he was “wrong in not immediately grasping the moral imperative of pursuing both policies simultaneously, in spite of the difficulty that poses.” More: https://revkin.substack.com/i/79692370/al-gores-adaptation-mea-culpa
In other words: it's complicated. A well-written piece. But a bitter blow to the armchair warriors who must now come to realize that all their efforts: a) did not lower, or even dent the rate of increase, of atmospheric CO2 one single bit; b) were only successfully able to impact GDP in a negative way thanks to their political lobbying; c) must embrace adaptation to deal with their cognitive bias from a & b, to avoid being branded as the Great Horde of the Easily Discombobulated. Nature will eventually cause the rate of CO2 increase to flatten, despite humanity's best efforts to increase it further, at which point we will finally be able - at long last -to convince the GHED's that natural variability trumps [sorry] CO2 in causing climate change. We used to know this, back when we trusted archeologists and geologists to tell us that a) geologically speaking atmospheric CO2 shows no correlation with global temperature and b) civilizations collapse when natural, pre-industrial climate change (mainly precipitation shifts) caused the food to run out (see: H. Lamb, Climate, History and the Modern World). It's hard to be an armchair warrior when you're hungry. There's no danger of the food running out if CO2 keeps increasing, unless you let GDP powerhouses like China eat your lunch.
It continues to amaze how one uses a paper based on a set of key premises one seemingly disagrees with to make some kind of point. The selective embrace of Roger et al's views is fascinating.
Hi Kim, I'm not sure what you mean by "seemingly disagree with", or even if your comment applies to mine. I agree with the post's take that adaptation is now - rightly - taking precedence over mitigation. Much of the post deals with how global metrics have improved despite anthropogenic CO2 increases and how little present and future anthropogenic CO2 increases impact modelled near-term outcomes, e.g. impact of climate change on cereal yields. And that the impact of mitigation measures is non-existent. I agree. My closing comments are pointing out that no civilization ever collapsed because it got too warm, but many did when the food ran out, a problem Earth does not seem to be having. Large areas of the planet are greening, which should equal more plants and animals. Major climate shifts such as the drying of the Sahara around 3000 BC are not happening at present. Hence, adaptation is the correct way to go. The main post premise I don't agree with - and the one that apparently prompted you to reply - is that net-zero and mitigation will again become important somewhere down the road. I disagree for a number of reasons, the main one being humans can't increase the atmospheric CO2 content beyond certain levels, and the effects of the current increases are relatively benign. To quote the post: "Most climate-sensitive societal outcomes have been steadily improving in most regions,". That's what the post's about: living with up until now benign change that's resulted in human progress. Read the post. It's good.
That's not a minor disagreement given how costly mitigation is framed to be (why it's framed like that is an interesting aside).
You would also be for adaptation solutions that Roger et al supposedly would not - due to how it could - to them - escalate the recognized problem that you don't recognize.
Africa's future looks very different if the stance in the paper is adopted versus if your stance is adopted.
Well all that would be true if I had a stance, and were an armchair warrior. I think the proposed strategy is reasonable and well thought out. But getting it implemented will require reaching some kind of accord with the taxpayers who want 90% mitigation and those who want 10%. That's politics.
I’m sorry, this is overall a good paper but I can see an absurdity sticking out like a sore thumb:
“the Earth will continue to warm until emissions reach net zero”. Really, Roger? So if humankind would somehow get to “net zero” anytime soon, inevitably by regressing to the Stone Age, we know that there will not be any natural cause that might further raise the Earth’s temperature? Roger, you are surely aware that the Earth has been much warmer than currently during its history, and I’m not even talking about the Jurassic period but much more recently, for instance when temperate forests covered Greenland - their remains are now discovered under the ice.
This statement is a scientific absurdity, a genuflection to the “settled science”. I guess publishing still has a nasty price.
Personally I think this is a silly bit of nitpicking (this goes for each instance of this critique in the comments).
No one denies the Earth’s pre-industrial history of temperature changes. What they mean is that the Earth will continue to warm from *anthropogenic causes* until net zero is reached.
The sentence was not part of an impromptu exchange or even a regular post. You seem to be unaware of the requirements for a scientific paper, which are not supposed to include ambiguous or misleading statements. Not to mention that the issue at stake, anthropogenic vs. natural factors in climate change, is not only a key scientific question, but also one that has been approached in the last decades with a heavy, politically-induced bias. If you have to explain “what the authors really meant”, it’s clear that the statement has no place in a scientific paper. I’m amazed you seem not to be aware of this.
Roger, I fully understand this statement is not the focus of the paper, which is a good, very needed one, as I have stated from the beginning. But you did invite comments and the statement, even if marginal to the paper, goes straight to issues that are fundamental for the problems that we’re dealing with today. You are certainly aware that the claim of exclusive anthropogenic factors in climate change is one of the cornerstones of climate alarmism.
Roger, you write that "Adaptation to climate has long been disparaged by climate advocates".
In a broader view, human adaptation to weather is an ever-present reflex action. Sunshine too bright? Put on sunglasses. Nights too warm for good sleep? Take off a blanket.
There are several remnant problems in the climate field. How about adapting to more regular actions like reversing the fundamental Ben Santer event? Without agreement, he changed the prepared, agreed 1992 IPCC text from no discernable climate influence from mankind, to a positive influence that mankind caused change? This is among the biggest issues in my recollection., a game changer.
What are we mitigating again? There has been no measurable increase in the frequency and intensity of severe weather events and a steady decline in weather related deaths. What are we even talking about?
I hope this article gets a very broad distribution. It seems to be amongst the most important ideas on climate change that I have ever read. Congratulations..
Fascinating piece. I'd only quibble with the phrase "low cost renewables".
There is no such thing. Renewables (wind/solar) are cheap to operate (no fuel costs), but not cheap to build, their unreliability imposes costs on the grid (hidden by tax credits), and their short life incurs expensive decommissioning and replacement costs.
“ Mitigation remains a crucial long-term goal for society—the Earth will continue to warm until emissions reach net zero.”
Objection your honor. Speculation.
Go Bees
Thanks. I look forward to your paper. Your piece here makes a great set of points. BTW, I have made similar arguments in class on the course , Energy and Civilization, I co-teach at UC Berkeley. Perhaps, you and I can chat someday soon. Thanks again for helping to raise awareness on a key topic of our times.
Thank you, sir. This is an outstanding and thought-provoking essay. Several comments/thoughts/suggestions.
Your definition of “adaption” is spot-on. It should be framed and sent in big, bold letters to Messers Gore and Dessler. That said, I would suggest you add a similar definition of “mitigation.” You attempt to provide some comparisons (efficiency, renewables), but those comparisons do not clearly define what “climate mitigation” means.
You state early in your essay that “[m]itigation remains a crucial long-term goal for society—the Earth will continue to warm until emissions reach net zero.” I would submit that this is a statement of opinion, not fact. In fact, we have no evidence suggesting mitigation will “stop” warming, no do we have any idea what the earth will do whether emissions continue or cease. We can only surmise, based on geologic history. That history suggests that because the earth has in fact been warmer, it could easily continue to warm.
You argue that adaption is the dominant driver in outcomes. In fact, adaption and development have been the ONLY means of improving long-term outcomes of crop yields, damages and death rates from extreme weather, and long-term life expectancy and health improvements. You have observed in previous posts that never in history has mankind been safer from extreme weather and climate. Can you point to any single "mitigation" strategy that has allowed us to reach this point? It is true that adaption has created risks, evidenced by a warming planet, but it is only human arrogance that gives rise to the belief that humans can in fact control geologic and cosmic processes that influence our environment.
Andy May has written that Andy May has written that “the climate debate ‘is not whether humans influence the climate, the debate is over how much we contribute and whether the additional warming is dangerous.’”
I believe your conclusions are exactly correct, but that the implications are incomplete. Respectfully, here is where the paper falls short of its potential. In truth, “economic development” has been only the apparent driver, but in fact the real driver has been energy – the increased availability of reliable, efficient, and practical energy sources. In my humble opinions, any attempts to master our climate must be met first with a complete mastery of our energy sources.
Towards the end of your essay, you state “Take note however that this conclusion does not mean that reducing emissions makes no sense. To the contrary, we argue that to be effective mitigation policies should learn lessons from successes in adaptation — notably the alignment of the time and space scales of costs and benefits.” Frankly, I’m not sure what to think of these statements. They seem to be kowtowing to the current political atmosphere that cancels any opinion contrary to the consensus. What makes “sense” is the continued improvement in energy development – that is, moving from less dense to more dense power sources.
IF we accept the premise that the economy is a derivative of energy, then to improve that economy we must improve the efficiency of our energy use, not policies directed at adaption or mitigation, per se. Indeed, if we are to improve our climate sensitive outcomes, it must be driven by better, more reliable and more affordable energy.
I am looking forward to your thoughts on the Endangerment Finding. Thank you again for your great work.
Roger, I think that 1% GDP you refer to may have been cumulative over a number of years : )
It’s hard to imagine any reasonable person advocating for a climate policy that costs that much annually.
Ha!
You’ll need to expand that imagination 👍
Since Roger invited comments, I would like to add a more precise comment on this puzzling statement: “the Earth will continue to warm until emissions reach net zero”. This is nothing less than a return to the “hockey stick” fraud, and could as well have been written by Michael Mann. The statement implies not only that ALL climate warming is anthropogenic, but also that there are no natural factors that might cause the climate to warm in the absence of human use of fossil fuels . According to these authors, if human activity would just cease (“net zero”), the Earth’s climate would return to some kind of stable state - the flat part of the infamous hockey stick. Are Burgess et al even aware of Milankovich cyclicity or variable solar activity, to mention just a couple of many natural factors that impact Earth’s climate in the short term, causing climate events such as the Medieval Optimum or the subsequent Little Ice Age? Why would the authors blow up their scientific credibility with such an absurd statement? Is this a requirement in order to publish in the (in)famous peer-reviewed system?
“The statement implies not only that ALL climate warming is anthropogenic, but also that there are no natural factors that might cause the climate to warm in the absence of human use of fossil fuels.”
No climate scientist would sign on to this claim. I doubt you could find a single climate scientist (operating at a university) who isn’t familiar with the Earth’s natural temperature forcings.
You seem to also be blissfully unaware of the fact that while climate scientists must know of natural temperature forcings, there are extremely few papers published on this topic and the general trend is to ignore them. Might that have something to do with the fact that if you choose to study natural factors you are unlikely to get funding and then to get published, and eventually end up as an outcast? Or maybe you are also unaware of this as well? You should read more of Roger’s posts on this topic. Although for a slightly different reason, he also became an outcast.
For a headspinning review of the many causes of warming and cooling, read the 2025 paper in Climate by James E. Hansen et al. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00139157.2025.2434494#abstract
Here's an excerpt from the abstract:
"Global temperature leaped more than 0.4°C (0.7°F) during the past two years, the 12-month average peaking in August 2024 at +1.6°C relative to the temperature at the beginning of last century (the 1880-1920 average). This temperature jump was spurred by one of the periodic tropical El Niño warming events, but many Earth scientists were baffled by the magnitude of the global warming, which was twice as large as expected for the weak 2023-2024 El Niño. We find that most of the other half of the warming was caused by a restriction on aerosol emissions by ships, which was imposed in 2020 by the International Maritime Organization to combat the effect of aerosol pollutants on human health." And that's just a fraction of the factors discussed in the paper.
Doesn't that mean that aerosol emissions negate the warming effects of the CO2 emissions from ships? What about coal and oil-fired power-generating stations? Ship emissions are dwarfed by the emissions of coal and oil-fired power generation.
Scientific papers like this often boldly predict the temperature effects of atmospheric forcing as if that is easy to do. Never mind that most model predictions prove to be very wrong. To my knowledge, no scientist has discovered (and validated) a way to directly measure the temperature effect of a specific atmospheric forcing, isolated from other factors that affect temperature. If you can't do that, how do you know it's true?
This paper is a positive development notwithstanding the unsubstantiated claim that the “Earth will continue to warm until emissions reach net zero”. You have previously detailed how difficult, if not impossible, net zero is, both here at THB and in the “Climate Fix”.
Nice work; as per your predictive skills you are too modest: you said this already in 2000:
Daniel Sarewitz and Roger Pielke Jr. Breaking the global-warming
gridlock. The Atlantic, 2000. Volume Title: July 2000. URL: https:
//www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/07/breaking-t
he-global-warming-gridlock/304973/.
I’ll refrain from further comments until I’ve had time to study the report in more detail, but my initial reaction is to flag the continued dissonance between the level of economic development proposed here and the more modest development trajectories assumed in the frequently cited´and currently tracked IPCC emissions scenarios. Raising per capita emissions in Africa alone to something like 3 metric tons of CO₂ per year would put pressure on those scenarios in ways I wonder if they are designed to accommodate.
It also feels convenient to lean on technological advances that were arguably driven into existence by an - perhaps overzealous - mitigation strategy in order to justify a more adaptation-centric approach.
It feels very similar to when Lomborg is embraced by politicians who've clearly demonstrated that they are absolutely not willing to commit to the level of R&D he recommends.
Finally, referring to the Gates memo as “maligned” strikes me as unnecessary and needlessly confrontational.
These things aside, great work of course.
I agree completely with your pushback on Andrew Dessler's view of adaptation and rebutted him here: https://revkin.substack.com/p/dont-fall-into-the-binary-emissions?utm_source=publication-search Happy to try to get you all in a #sustainwhat conversation with some deeply-dug-in adaptation experts like Lisa Schipper and Ed Carr.
Happy to do so!
Like almost everyone, you must have missed Al Gore's 2013 book, "The Future," with his mea culpa for that 1992 attack on adaptation. His revised view? Those resisting action on emissions were wrong to tout adaptation alone, Gore wrote. But he said he was “wrong in not immediately grasping the moral imperative of pursuing both policies simultaneously, in spite of the difficulty that poses.” More: https://revkin.substack.com/i/79692370/al-gores-adaptation-mea-culpa
In other words: it's complicated. A well-written piece. But a bitter blow to the armchair warriors who must now come to realize that all their efforts: a) did not lower, or even dent the rate of increase, of atmospheric CO2 one single bit; b) were only successfully able to impact GDP in a negative way thanks to their political lobbying; c) must embrace adaptation to deal with their cognitive bias from a & b, to avoid being branded as the Great Horde of the Easily Discombobulated. Nature will eventually cause the rate of CO2 increase to flatten, despite humanity's best efforts to increase it further, at which point we will finally be able - at long last -to convince the GHED's that natural variability trumps [sorry] CO2 in causing climate change. We used to know this, back when we trusted archeologists and geologists to tell us that a) geologically speaking atmospheric CO2 shows no correlation with global temperature and b) civilizations collapse when natural, pre-industrial climate change (mainly precipitation shifts) caused the food to run out (see: H. Lamb, Climate, History and the Modern World). It's hard to be an armchair warrior when you're hungry. There's no danger of the food running out if CO2 keeps increasing, unless you let GDP powerhouses like China eat your lunch.
It continues to amaze how one uses a paper based on a set of key premises one seemingly disagrees with to make some kind of point. The selective embrace of Roger et al's views is fascinating.
Hi Kim, I'm not sure what you mean by "seemingly disagree with", or even if your comment applies to mine. I agree with the post's take that adaptation is now - rightly - taking precedence over mitigation. Much of the post deals with how global metrics have improved despite anthropogenic CO2 increases and how little present and future anthropogenic CO2 increases impact modelled near-term outcomes, e.g. impact of climate change on cereal yields. And that the impact of mitigation measures is non-existent. I agree. My closing comments are pointing out that no civilization ever collapsed because it got too warm, but many did when the food ran out, a problem Earth does not seem to be having. Large areas of the planet are greening, which should equal more plants and animals. Major climate shifts such as the drying of the Sahara around 3000 BC are not happening at present. Hence, adaptation is the correct way to go. The main post premise I don't agree with - and the one that apparently prompted you to reply - is that net-zero and mitigation will again become important somewhere down the road. I disagree for a number of reasons, the main one being humans can't increase the atmospheric CO2 content beyond certain levels, and the effects of the current increases are relatively benign. To quote the post: "Most climate-sensitive societal outcomes have been steadily improving in most regions,". That's what the post's about: living with up until now benign change that's resulted in human progress. Read the post. It's good.
That's not a minor disagreement given how costly mitigation is framed to be (why it's framed like that is an interesting aside).
You would also be for adaptation solutions that Roger et al supposedly would not - due to how it could - to them - escalate the recognized problem that you don't recognize.
Africa's future looks very different if the stance in the paper is adopted versus if your stance is adopted.
Well all that would be true if I had a stance, and were an armchair warrior. I think the proposed strategy is reasonable and well thought out. But getting it implemented will require reaching some kind of accord with the taxpayers who want 90% mitigation and those who want 10%. That's politics.
I’m sorry, this is overall a good paper but I can see an absurdity sticking out like a sore thumb:
“the Earth will continue to warm until emissions reach net zero”. Really, Roger? So if humankind would somehow get to “net zero” anytime soon, inevitably by regressing to the Stone Age, we know that there will not be any natural cause that might further raise the Earth’s temperature? Roger, you are surely aware that the Earth has been much warmer than currently during its history, and I’m not even talking about the Jurassic period but much more recently, for instance when temperate forests covered Greenland - their remains are now discovered under the ice.
This statement is a scientific absurdity, a genuflection to the “settled science”. I guess publishing still has a nasty price.
Personally I think this is a silly bit of nitpicking (this goes for each instance of this critique in the comments).
No one denies the Earth’s pre-industrial history of temperature changes. What they mean is that the Earth will continue to warm from *anthropogenic causes* until net zero is reached.
The sentence was not part of an impromptu exchange or even a regular post. You seem to be unaware of the requirements for a scientific paper, which are not supposed to include ambiguous or misleading statements. Not to mention that the issue at stake, anthropogenic vs. natural factors in climate change, is not only a key scientific question, but also one that has been approached in the last decades with a heavy, politically-induced bias. If you have to explain “what the authors really meant”, it’s clear that the statement has no place in a scientific paper. I’m amazed you seem not to be aware of this.
That is of course why it is a preprint and we have requested comments! Have at it 🤓
If you share your name you’ll even get credited for constructive critique 👍
Yes, you have full access to TCF Chapter 1 where this is discussed at length
We are happy to word smith that sentence, but really, it sits far from the focus of this paper 😎
Roger, I fully understand this statement is not the focus of the paper, which is a good, very needed one, as I have stated from the beginning. But you did invite comments and the statement, even if marginal to the paper, goes straight to issues that are fundamental for the problems that we’re dealing with today. You are certainly aware that the claim of exclusive anthropogenic factors in climate change is one of the cornerstones of climate alarmism.
Roger, you write that "Adaptation to climate has long been disparaged by climate advocates".
In a broader view, human adaptation to weather is an ever-present reflex action. Sunshine too bright? Put on sunglasses. Nights too warm for good sleep? Take off a blanket.
There are several remnant problems in the climate field. How about adapting to more regular actions like reversing the fundamental Ben Santer event? Without agreement, he changed the prepared, agreed 1992 IPCC text from no discernable climate influence from mankind, to a positive influence that mankind caused change? This is among the biggest issues in my recollection., a game changer.
Geoff S
What are we mitigating again? There has been no measurable increase in the frequency and intensity of severe weather events and a steady decline in weather related deaths. What are we even talking about?
I hope this article gets a very broad distribution. It seems to be amongst the most important ideas on climate change that I have ever read. Congratulations..
Richard:
The paper is pure garbage!
We have been in a La Nina since early 2025, and the Earth has cooled down
To speak of warming when none is occurring, is the height of idiocy!.