National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine just released its interim report on scientific ocean drilling. Note that SSP5-8.5 is still in there! Check page 50 from the report:
Obviously, I agree with you that RCP 8.5 is ridiculous. In fact, as I've written to you in the past, it was known that RCP 8.5 was ridiculous from the moment it came out in 2011. RCP 8.5 is essentially just a re-do of the "A1FI" (A1 scenario, "Fossil Intensive").
As you probably know, A1FI scenario came out with the IPCC's Third Assessment Report (TAR), way back in 2001. And even then, any good technology analyst (e.g., Jesse Ausubel, and yours truly ;)) could tell that the A1FI scenario emissions were ridiculously high in the latter half of the 21st century, since the high rate of fossil fuel use--especially coal--defied all reasonable expectations for technology development.
So I maintain that not only was RCP 8.5 known to involve too much use of coal in the 21st century when it first came out in 2011, but even a *decade* before that, when the comparable A1FI scenario came out.
BUT--and this is a big "but"--have you seen NASA GISTEMP surface temperature measurements lately? Even though I think global CO2 emissions in the 21st century are going to come in very close to what I predicted as the most likely amount of CO2 emissions, way back in 2006:
...I think the actual *temperatures* may be significantly higher than the value I predicted as the most likely temperature rise. In other words, my CO2 predictions I think will be shown very accurate, but the temperature may be higher, due to higher climate sensitivity than I expected.
Bottom line: The bottom line here is that not only should *emissions* predictions be revisited with each IPCC assessment report, the resulting temperature predictions need to also be revisited with each assessment report.
P.S. Important caveat: I haven't really had a chance to look at what recent satellite temperature data look like, as compared to surface temperature measurement data. I've always thought very strongly that satellite tropospheric temperature measurements are a better way to assess the effects of greenhouse gas emissions, rather than surface temperature measurements.
Thank you for a lucid and honest review of the current science still using older disproven science as a climate forecast trend. I read and learn with each post on THB. It is refreshing to see such honesty.
I once heard a Cold War story, possibly an urban legend, of a tiny town in the Soviet Far East told to adjust its clocks for daylight savings on a certain day each year. But they didn't receive the order from the regime to fall back on a certain day. So, a decade later, the town was dutifully enduring "midnight" in broad daylight because nobody was brave enough to challenge the absurdity.
Even if it isn't a literally true story, it's a story deeply rooted in The Truth, as the slavish adherence to RCP 8.5 demonstrates.
Climate projections scenarios are no science but a kind of unproven engineering of interactive climatic processes bundled in approximative models. Even if a most probable scenario would exist, the use of too hot running models can only provide garbage, a waste of resources leading to ill-fated policies. Indeed they run too hot, not by a few two digits percentages but by a 2-4 multiple.
Unsettled science can't help bad scenarios; and the best scenario can't correct unsettled science.
(BTW: Those two of 31 models that remain close to the observed reality are of Russian origin. So, by current sentiments they cannot be good.)
It is not just scientists who are overestimating emissions. Panicked journalists are writing prophesies of doom in the everyday press. Despite the many excellent posts Roger has shared with us to the contrary, the lay press, newspapers and broadcasts persistently claim that all forms of extreme weather are already upon us. Floods, hurricanes and drought are consistently portrayed as worsening when the AR6 Table 12.12 Roger showed us tells the opposite. Today the Daily Mail had a story by Rob Crilly citing a survey of 12,000 people who were asked to rank, out of 32 concerns, their perceived top three worst risks for the near future. 65% of Democrats picked extreme weather as the worst risk they feared, followed by Climate change in general and habitat destruction. This is scare mongering on a continental scale. (Curiously, Republicans had a different ranking; they were worried about China, Iran and the economy in that order. Independents were worried most about cyberattacks.)
Mr. Mann exhibits all 4 of Rayner's reactions to uncomfortable knowledge. Why is anyone of average intelligence or better continually bullied by him? Mark Steyn and Simberg compared him to Jerry Sandusky, and we chastised by the jury for as much. A far more accurate comparison for Mr. Mann is to Joseph McCarthy. Where is Joseph Welch, or his clone, when he is needed?
Yes, I know, I will go straight to the top of the "sue him" list for my comparison. What the hell, I need something to do!
It is wrong to compare Michael Mann to Joseph McCarthy.
McCarthy was at least 90% correct in naming the Communist agents that had infiltrated the U.S. government. Very few of his accusations were wrong.
Here are three books that provide detail on this:
Haynes and Klehr, "Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America". Yale University Press, 1999. This book shows the many messages sent by telegraph and other methods between USSR agents in Russia and in the United States. They were only released in 1995.
Herman, "Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator" The Free Press, 2000.
M. Stanton Evans, "Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and his fight against America's Enemies" Three Rivers Press, 2007. Evans was one of the most noteworthy journalists of the 20th century. The book is more than 600 pages, with an additional 20 pages for the index.
The USSR had infiltrated the U.S. government in many ways and McCarthy was generally correct about the serious problems that were created by this. It was not just obvious agents like Alger Hiss, but many who were in lower levels of our government.
My apologies for taking so long to respond, as your note prompted some needed research on my part. My purpose in comparing Mann with McCarthy wasn’t in reference to McCarthy’s (or Mann’s, for that matter) accuracy, but rather to McCarthy’s demagogic style. McCarthy addressed a real problem (at that time), but his approach caused untold grief.
I am not qualified to comment on the accuracy of the “hockey stick,” though it seems that when considering the geologic history of the earth, many such hockey sticks can be found. My problem with Mann is his bullying approach, what Judith Curry calls “the scientific madhouse effect.” This is characterized by rampant overconfidence in an overly simplistic theory of climate change, enforcement of a politically-motivated, manufactured ‘consensus’, attempts to stifle scientific and policy debates, activism and advocacy for their preferred politics and policy, self-promotion and ‘cashing in’, and finally public attacks on other scientists that do not support the ‘consensus’.
Perhaps is a smudge on McCarthy to be compared to Mann? Communism eventually collapsed. Hopefully, “Climatism” will suffer the same fate. Thank you again for enlightening me on McCarthy's history. I am old enough to remember (vaguely) the Army-McCarthy hearings, and the public perception of McCarthy' style. But it was never a period that I found interesting, hence my need for research.
I'm not sure, McCarthy didn't have unnamed billionaires paying his legal battles.
Thats another thing i don't get, we aren't supposed to let dark money corrupt and influence elections, isn't the judicial system just as important? If Piltdown is trying to game the system using anonymous money, shouldn't that be exposed?
Aren't we better off if all the cockroaches are exposed to the disinfection of light?
I don't remember the Mccarthy hearings well enough to know about his money. He did have the FBI behind him, and his arrogance certainly is in the same league as Mann's.
What bothers me most is the censorship that comes from an atmosphere of fear. Bullying, ad hominem, litigation, they are all censorship in one form or another.
However you slice it, it is a very sad state of affairs.
In trying to understand the remarkable grip on the literature of RCP 8.5, we're in blind-men-and-the-elephant territory. There are a number of different things going on, and the importance that observers assign to each of them depends heavily on their background and perspective.
I suspect that Andy A. West has a handle on a big part of the answer, as he laid out in his recent book The Grip of Culture. It's perfectly consistent with his analysis to find intelligent and highly trained people doing things that have the trappings of science, but have little to do with readily accessible realities in the real world. RCP 8.5 shows up in places where it's jarring and hard to understand if all you care about is getting things right, but as a note in a cultural anthem it works just fine.
Predictive models are only as good as the data and assumptions used to create them. It sounds like the IPCC and the climate science community need to check and correct the assumptions and data incorporated into their scenarios but for a variety of reasons don’t want to.
"In shape contrast, the practice of medicine before the EBM (evidenced based medicine) movement was shackled with an extremely slow and inefficient mechanism for dissemination medical results. The Institute of Medicine estimates that it took “an average of 17 years for new knowledge generated by randomized controlled trials to be incorporated into practice, and even then the application [was] highly uneven.” Progress in medical science occurred one funeral at a time. If doctors didn’t learn about something in medical school or in their residency, there was a good chance they never would."
Super Crunchers, Ian Ayers, Bantum Books, New Your, 2007
The scientific literature is full of studies that are outdated or just wrong. It is the job of us experts to be aware of that -- that is why science is, in principle, self-correcting. In the case of RCP8.5 the problem is that (many) experts do know better but are not acting that way. There are a lot of reasons for this lock in, but it cannot last forever. But maybe a few more years!
It's sad how corrupt science research and climate science in particular has unfolded over the last decade or so. As a scientist I find this to be not only alarming but soul killing. Politics and money have always had a had an influence on scientific research but it use to be under control (kind of). Unfortunately like most things in our "instant gratification" culture what may have once been tolerable has now become a crisis. I blame media hype and greedy researchers looking for more funding (always more funding) Politicians have little scientific (and economic) understanding and can easily be led astray by unscrupulous researchers. Thanks for fighting the good fight.
In most science research the goal is to find the truth (as well as it can be determined). In much of climate research the goal is to find how bad secondary effects from increasing temperature will likely be across many different areas. If those research studies start from an assumption of a low RCP (or SSP) and no significant future issues are identified, then that research was mostly useless. Thus, there is an incentive (subconscious or conscious) to do a study where the findings will draw notice to the published paper. I fear an increasing part of climate research is becoming dishonest.
Thank you for your helpful debunking of CO2 emission projections. On the other hand it seems to me that the climate alarmists have been focusing more on the impacts of climate change (blamed on GHG) such as higher temperatures, rising sea levels, melting polar caps/ ice, bird and marine life morbidly and extinction, etc..
Just last week I read scientists were stating temperatures are higher than predicted and ice is melting faster. Have they moved away from their faulty CO2 projections and now campaigning on severity of impacts? It’s overwhelmingly difficult to keep up with the weekly climate catastrophe headlines. I rely on your level headed examinations of the science to keep me grounded.
I understand that once a conclusion in science has been established then it is natural to use it as a building block, especially in medical science, in order to accelerate the benefits. Unfortunately a strong element in the motivation in climate science has been money and politics, not the betterment of mankind. I am not a scientist but I concluded 10+ years ago, after a little research, that there could not be certainty that 1 extra part per million of CO2 could be the cause of warming oceans which were some 3500 times the heat density of the atmosphere. It just didn’t stack up to my simple mind and hopefully Miskolczis 2023 paper ( https://doi.org/10.53234/scc202304/05 ) which refutes the whole IPCC thesis will go a long way towards correcting lingering misconceptions about it!
"After watching the Michael Mann debacle, one can’t help but notice Mann has become relevant again. Stories about the Mann/Steyn case and Op-Ed’s written by Mann are all over Major Media, again.
How can “science” allow him to become the most visible spokesman for the climate crisis, once more? As you have pointed out, old science casts a long shadow with deep roots. "
Dead fish rot from the head down. When the top science journals and meteorological societies refuse to condemn bad science and bad behavior it becomes endemic...which was Mark Steyn's point
National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine just released its interim report on scientific ocean drilling. Note that SSP5-8.5 is still in there! Check page 50 from the report:
https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/27414/progress-and-priorities-in-ocean-drilling-in-search-of-earths-past-and-future
Hi Roger,
I see you're retiring. Welcome to the club! :-)
Obviously, I agree with you that RCP 8.5 is ridiculous. In fact, as I've written to you in the past, it was known that RCP 8.5 was ridiculous from the moment it came out in 2011. RCP 8.5 is essentially just a re-do of the "A1FI" (A1 scenario, "Fossil Intensive").
As you probably know, A1FI scenario came out with the IPCC's Third Assessment Report (TAR), way back in 2001. And even then, any good technology analyst (e.g., Jesse Ausubel, and yours truly ;)) could tell that the A1FI scenario emissions were ridiculously high in the latter half of the 21st century, since the high rate of fossil fuel use--especially coal--defied all reasonable expectations for technology development.
So I maintain that not only was RCP 8.5 known to involve too much use of coal in the 21st century when it first came out in 2011, but even a *decade* before that, when the comparable A1FI scenario came out.
BUT--and this is a big "but"--have you seen NASA GISTEMP surface temperature measurements lately? Even though I think global CO2 emissions in the 21st century are going to come in very close to what I predicted as the most likely amount of CO2 emissions, way back in 2006:
https://markbahner.typepad.com/random_thoughts/2017/07/mark-bahner-vs-wigley-and-raper-science-2001-vs-ipcc-rcps.html
...I think the actual *temperatures* may be significantly higher than the value I predicted as the most likely temperature rise. In other words, my CO2 predictions I think will be shown very accurate, but the temperature may be higher, due to higher climate sensitivity than I expected.
Bottom line: The bottom line here is that not only should *emissions* predictions be revisited with each IPCC assessment report, the resulting temperature predictions need to also be revisited with each assessment report.
P.S. Important caveat: I haven't really had a chance to look at what recent satellite temperature data look like, as compared to surface temperature measurement data. I've always thought very strongly that satellite tropospheric temperature measurements are a better way to assess the effects of greenhouse gas emissions, rather than surface temperature measurements.
Thank you for a lucid and honest review of the current science still using older disproven science as a climate forecast trend. I read and learn with each post on THB. It is refreshing to see such honesty.
I once heard a Cold War story, possibly an urban legend, of a tiny town in the Soviet Far East told to adjust its clocks for daylight savings on a certain day each year. But they didn't receive the order from the regime to fall back on a certain day. So, a decade later, the town was dutifully enduring "midnight" in broad daylight because nobody was brave enough to challenge the absurdity.
Even if it isn't a literally true story, it's a story deeply rooted in The Truth, as the slavish adherence to RCP 8.5 demonstrates.
Climate projections scenarios are no science but a kind of unproven engineering of interactive climatic processes bundled in approximative models. Even if a most probable scenario would exist, the use of too hot running models can only provide garbage, a waste of resources leading to ill-fated policies. Indeed they run too hot, not by a few two digits percentages but by a 2-4 multiple.
Unsettled science can't help bad scenarios; and the best scenario can't correct unsettled science.
(BTW: Those two of 31 models that remain close to the observed reality are of Russian origin. So, by current sentiments they cannot be good.)
It's not momentum. It's bias.
It is not just scientists who are overestimating emissions. Panicked journalists are writing prophesies of doom in the everyday press. Despite the many excellent posts Roger has shared with us to the contrary, the lay press, newspapers and broadcasts persistently claim that all forms of extreme weather are already upon us. Floods, hurricanes and drought are consistently portrayed as worsening when the AR6 Table 12.12 Roger showed us tells the opposite. Today the Daily Mail had a story by Rob Crilly citing a survey of 12,000 people who were asked to rank, out of 32 concerns, their perceived top three worst risks for the near future. 65% of Democrats picked extreme weather as the worst risk they feared, followed by Climate change in general and habitat destruction. This is scare mongering on a continental scale. (Curiously, Republicans had a different ranking; they were worried about China, Iran and the economy in that order. Independents were worried most about cyberattacks.)
To paraphrase the the title of your book;
The Climate Fix…IS IN!!!
45000 examples of decision based evidence making, whatever the first 17,000 are the following 28,000 are academic fraud.
Why dance around it? You don’t seem scared to ruffle feathers?
Piltdown Mann has already taken his shots at you, by the way nothing shows your stellar character more than how much he attacks you.
He makes anonymous internet trolls blush in admiration.
Mr. Mann exhibits all 4 of Rayner's reactions to uncomfortable knowledge. Why is anyone of average intelligence or better continually bullied by him? Mark Steyn and Simberg compared him to Jerry Sandusky, and we chastised by the jury for as much. A far more accurate comparison for Mr. Mann is to Joseph McCarthy. Where is Joseph Welch, or his clone, when he is needed?
Yes, I know, I will go straight to the top of the "sue him" list for my comparison. What the hell, I need something to do!
It is wrong to compare Michael Mann to Joseph McCarthy.
McCarthy was at least 90% correct in naming the Communist agents that had infiltrated the U.S. government. Very few of his accusations were wrong.
Here are three books that provide detail on this:
Haynes and Klehr, "Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America". Yale University Press, 1999. This book shows the many messages sent by telegraph and other methods between USSR agents in Russia and in the United States. They were only released in 1995.
Herman, "Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator" The Free Press, 2000.
M. Stanton Evans, "Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and his fight against America's Enemies" Three Rivers Press, 2007. Evans was one of the most noteworthy journalists of the 20th century. The book is more than 600 pages, with an additional 20 pages for the index.
The USSR had infiltrated the U.S. government in many ways and McCarthy was generally correct about the serious problems that were created by this. It was not just obvious agents like Alger Hiss, but many who were in lower levels of our government.
My apologies for taking so long to respond, as your note prompted some needed research on my part. My purpose in comparing Mann with McCarthy wasn’t in reference to McCarthy’s (or Mann’s, for that matter) accuracy, but rather to McCarthy’s demagogic style. McCarthy addressed a real problem (at that time), but his approach caused untold grief.
I am not qualified to comment on the accuracy of the “hockey stick,” though it seems that when considering the geologic history of the earth, many such hockey sticks can be found. My problem with Mann is his bullying approach, what Judith Curry calls “the scientific madhouse effect.” This is characterized by rampant overconfidence in an overly simplistic theory of climate change, enforcement of a politically-motivated, manufactured ‘consensus’, attempts to stifle scientific and policy debates, activism and advocacy for their preferred politics and policy, self-promotion and ‘cashing in’, and finally public attacks on other scientists that do not support the ‘consensus’.
Perhaps is a smudge on McCarthy to be compared to Mann? Communism eventually collapsed. Hopefully, “Climatism” will suffer the same fate. Thank you again for enlightening me on McCarthy's history. I am old enough to remember (vaguely) the Army-McCarthy hearings, and the public perception of McCarthy' style. But it was never a period that I found interesting, hence my need for research.
Thank you for this helpful response!
And I thank you for the reading references.
“ Mark Steyn and Simberg compared him to Jerry Sandusky”
That is Mann’s mischaracterization of it.
In reality they compared his treatment by the university to how it treated Sandusky, with coverups and bullying, and they were 100% right.
Almost certainly that $1mil award will be thrown out but we’ll never hear that in the MSM.
All we’ll hear is Piltdown Mann won.
Same as in the Tim Ball case, Piltdown failed to defend the indefensible and so he “won”.
Purely a SLAPP case same as the recent one
You are totally correct. Even then, don't yiu think the comparison to McCarthy is more appropriate?
I'm not sure, McCarthy didn't have unnamed billionaires paying his legal battles.
Thats another thing i don't get, we aren't supposed to let dark money corrupt and influence elections, isn't the judicial system just as important? If Piltdown is trying to game the system using anonymous money, shouldn't that be exposed?
Aren't we better off if all the cockroaches are exposed to the disinfection of light?
I don't remember the Mccarthy hearings well enough to know about his money. He did have the FBI behind him, and his arrogance certainly is in the same league as Mann's.
What bothers me most is the censorship that comes from an atmosphere of fear. Bullying, ad hominem, litigation, they are all censorship in one form or another.
However you slice it, it is a very sad state of affairs.
If this is not changed it will destroy science for a generation.
Why would anyone believe anything from "science".
Just one more institution destroyed by the communists, for lack of a better word.
In trying to understand the remarkable grip on the literature of RCP 8.5, we're in blind-men-and-the-elephant territory. There are a number of different things going on, and the importance that observers assign to each of them depends heavily on their background and perspective.
I suspect that Andy A. West has a handle on a big part of the answer, as he laid out in his recent book The Grip of Culture. It's perfectly consistent with his analysis to find intelligent and highly trained people doing things that have the trappings of science, but have little to do with readily accessible realities in the real world. RCP 8.5 shows up in places where it's jarring and hard to understand if all you care about is getting things right, but as a note in a cultural anthem it works just fine.
Decision based evidence making.
All the explanation you will ever need.
Predictive models are only as good as the data and assumptions used to create them. It sounds like the IPCC and the climate science community need to check and correct the assumptions and data incorporated into their scenarios but for a variety of reasons don’t want to.
The Latency of Outdated Science — another example
17 Years
"In shape contrast, the practice of medicine before the EBM (evidenced based medicine) movement was shackled with an extremely slow and inefficient mechanism for dissemination medical results. The Institute of Medicine estimates that it took “an average of 17 years for new knowledge generated by randomized controlled trials to be incorporated into practice, and even then the application [was] highly uneven.” Progress in medical science occurred one funeral at a time. If doctors didn’t learn about something in medical school or in their residency, there was a good chance they never would."
Super Crunchers, Ian Ayers, Bantum Books, New Your, 2007
Layperson here.
Thank you Roger.
Can’t the old studies and papers referring to 8.5 on Google Scholar be either removed or marked with an indication that they are no longer relevant ?
TIA.
The scientific literature is full of studies that are outdated or just wrong. It is the job of us experts to be aware of that -- that is why science is, in principle, self-correcting. In the case of RCP8.5 the problem is that (many) experts do know better but are not acting that way. There are a lot of reasons for this lock in, but it cannot last forever. But maybe a few more years!
A few more years.
Math reveals 365x3x25
Only another ~28,000 Piltdown papers, each referenced 100 times by the climate/insane complex for 2.8million false climate emergency stories.
All numbers conservative.
How much harm can 2.8 million false stories do?
I’m sure it’s not much.
It's sad how corrupt science research and climate science in particular has unfolded over the last decade or so. As a scientist I find this to be not only alarming but soul killing. Politics and money have always had a had an influence on scientific research but it use to be under control (kind of). Unfortunately like most things in our "instant gratification" culture what may have once been tolerable has now become a crisis. I blame media hype and greedy researchers looking for more funding (always more funding) Politicians have little scientific (and economic) understanding and can easily be led astray by unscrupulous researchers. Thanks for fighting the good fight.
Got it, thanks.
In most science research the goal is to find the truth (as well as it can be determined). In much of climate research the goal is to find how bad secondary effects from increasing temperature will likely be across many different areas. If those research studies start from an assumption of a low RCP (or SSP) and no significant future issues are identified, then that research was mostly useless. Thus, there is an incentive (subconscious or conscious) to do a study where the findings will draw notice to the published paper. I fear an increasing part of climate research is becoming dishonest.
Can a paper that does not predict serious approaching problems even get published?
Thank you for your helpful debunking of CO2 emission projections. On the other hand it seems to me that the climate alarmists have been focusing more on the impacts of climate change (blamed on GHG) such as higher temperatures, rising sea levels, melting polar caps/ ice, bird and marine life morbidly and extinction, etc..
Just last week I read scientists were stating temperatures are higher than predicted and ice is melting faster. Have they moved away from their faulty CO2 projections and now campaigning on severity of impacts? It’s overwhelmingly difficult to keep up with the weekly climate catastrophe headlines. I rely on your level headed examinations of the science to keep me grounded.
I understand that once a conclusion in science has been established then it is natural to use it as a building block, especially in medical science, in order to accelerate the benefits. Unfortunately a strong element in the motivation in climate science has been money and politics, not the betterment of mankind. I am not a scientist but I concluded 10+ years ago, after a little research, that there could not be certainty that 1 extra part per million of CO2 could be the cause of warming oceans which were some 3500 times the heat density of the atmosphere. It just didn’t stack up to my simple mind and hopefully Miskolczis 2023 paper ( https://doi.org/10.53234/scc202304/05 ) which refutes the whole IPCC thesis will go a long way towards correcting lingering misconceptions about it!
Comment from Stephen Heins:
"After watching the Michael Mann debacle, one can’t help but notice Mann has become relevant again. Stories about the Mann/Steyn case and Op-Ed’s written by Mann are all over Major Media, again.
How can “science” allow him to become the most visible spokesman for the climate crisis, once more? As you have pointed out, old science casts a long shadow with deep roots. "
Dead fish rot from the head down. When the top science journals and meteorological societies refuse to condemn bad science and bad behavior it becomes endemic...which was Mark Steyn's point