Your Questions, My Answers

Tipping Points, Substack vs. Twitter, the Insect Apocalypse & More!

I’m back in Boulder after spending most of the past year away. More on my travels to come. Photo of the Flatirons: Wikipedia.

I received a lot of great questions this week. I am going to try more but shorter answers, and please let me know what you think about that format. If I didn’t get to or missed your question, please place into the comments.

Before jumping to the Q&A, two important things to note this week from the climate research and policy world, which may become full posts down the road:

• A fascinatingly new paper reported the results of a survey of coastal managers around the world, asking them what sea level rise scenarios they rely on for planning purposes. Unsurprisingly, but also incredibly troubling, 119 of the 253 coastal managers surveyed reported using sea level scenarios above the upper end (95th percentile) of the bounds of the RCP8.5 scenario. This is crazy, and represents solid evidence that RCP8.5 underpins not just a seemingly endless stream of out-of-date science, but also is being used improperly is real-world policy settings.

• The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) just released a climate update for the first three months of 2023. They reported no “billion dollar disasters” so far in 2023, but buried deep in their report was a note stating that there was a net addition of 7 new billion-dollar disasters in their “billion dollar disaster” dataset. Say what? I downloaded the current data on the NOAA site and compared to that I had downloaded in January, 2023. Ten new billion-dollar disasters were added and 3 removed. Why? Who knows? Whatever this is, it is not science. As I have said, the NOAA billion-dollar disaster’s are a national embarrassment.

Now on to your question and my answers . . .