#WTH The BS that is "climate science"

Or are we really going to build 30,000 more coal plants?

A few years ago, I got the crap kicked out of me (really, even that antisemite Trevor Noah thought he should attack me) for saying on Meet the Press that I was “not a scientist” and didn’t fully understand “anthropogenic warming.” It was as if I, Nietzsche-like, had pronounced that God is dead, right in the middle of Vatican City, on Easter. And then had smacked the Pope.

Now what I meant at the time was that since the climate had been changing long before people knew what a Prius was, I didn’t fully understand how the changes worked. (This, btw, contrasts me favorably with Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who, when asked to define a woman announced that she was “not a biologist.” But I digress.) Anywho… Turns out that much of the apocalyptic New York and California are going to be underwater, Al-Gore-the-world-is-ending, type warnings are lies and bought and paid for. We talked to Roger Pielke, a colleague at AEI and author of the substack The Honest Broker, on the pod to understand What the Hell is Going On.™

Here’s the deal: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that august UN body that collects scientific evaluations of climate change and then issues forth a consensus about it, decided some years ago to extrude a worst-case scenario (called RCP 8.5, if you must know), a best case scenario, and some in-between stuff. In their infinite wisdom, a group of scientists decided to label that worst-case scenario “business as usual.” What does that mean? It means that if the world continues “as is,” conducting “business as usual” in the energy, garbage, plastics, etc., climate-input space, then the worst-case scenario will come to pass. But wait, it gets better….

What is that worst-case scenario that is going to come to pass? Imagine that the world is going to build 30,000 new coal plants by 2100. There are currently about 6000 such plants; in what world are we building 30,000 more? To need that number of coal plants, we’d have to switch to powering every automobile in the world with coal. Is that happening? (Elon Musk shakes head.) No, it isn’t. It’s rubbish.

Now prepare to get really mad: The reason that this RCP 8.5 unrealistic, apocalyptic scenario is at the center of most climate assessments, including those done by the White House and Treasury Department (and now the Pentagon as well), is that someone paid for that to happen. Read all the details here. Long story short, working together, a group of billionaires including Mike Bloomberg, Hank Paulsen, and Tom Steyer decided that in order to get “climate action” they needed to foster a sense of crisis. So they paid for that crisis, used scientific grants to fund papers echoing that crisis, and propelled the worst-case scenario to the center of the debate.

In some ways, you can call this democracy in action. In others, you can call it the cynical manipulation of science to advance a political agenda. And if that last explanation sounds familiar (Covid, ahem), well, yes. Scientists aren’t policymakers, and the effort to elevate them to God-like status during Covid only served to diminish faith in the impartiality of real science. Turns out, a) scientists can be bought and paid for, and b) scientists aren’t great policymakers.

Here are a few other truths Pielke shared:

And another, on emissions:

All told, the tale of the climate apocalypse that everyone from Joe Biden to (ew) Greta Thunberg is selling us is little more than a sordid lie intended to advance a sinister agenda. Does that mean that climate change is fake news? Nah. But it does mean that as we move forward in thinking about how best to run our economy, perhaps it would be good to have honest policymakers focus on genuine incremental changes that can aid our adaptation. Just a thought.

HIGHLIGHTS

How does climate science use scenarios and how is that becoming corrupted?

RP: When scientists make projections of the long-term future of the climate, obviously one of the most important factors that goes into those projections is how much fossil fuels we're going to burn in the future because that leads to carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide accumulates in the atmosphere and it leads to a positive, what's called, radiative forcing, which leads to a warming of the planet.

So everything starts with the economy, what kind of energy sources we use, how we power them. And I guess, I call it the worst-known secret in climate science. It's that the scenarios that underpin pretty much all of the projective studies that are out today are getting to be about 15 or 20 years old, and scenarios get out of date. I mean, we can't predict the future. If we could, we wouldn't need scenarios.

But the real challenge is that even though most people in the climate community recognize that these scenarios are out of date, they persist. And so they're found cited by the White House, cited in Congress. The Federal Reserve just last week issued a report citing these out-of-date scenarios. Science is self-correcting, but sometimes it takes a frustratingly long time.

You write about this one scenario, Representation Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5, that is both apocalyptic and out of date. What is RCP 8.5 and why is it in use today?

RP: So the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, another acronym, IPCC. A lot of people have heard of that organization. Every 5, 6, 7 years, they collect all of the scenarios that the scientific community has produced. And it turns out it is thousands of scenarios because the future is a complicated place.

You can't do systematic research on thousands of scenarios. So in 2005, the IPCC decided, "All right, we're going to focus on four scenarios of the future. We're going to orient research around just these four. That way when research is done, and we can compare this paper with that paper and so on."

And what they did is they picked a very extreme scenario. That's the one that you mentioned, RCP 8.5. It suggests that we're going to burn up a lot of coal in the 21st century--in fact, all of it.

And then they picked a very low scenario, which goes by RCP 2.6, that's more like the Paris Agreement, and then they pick two in the middle. It turns out, and this was a fateful mistake, and we know that it was a mistake today, the most extreme scenario, RCP 8.5 was labeled: business as usual.

This is where we're headed if we don't change course. And so it paints a picture of a, you could even say, apocalyptic sort of future where temperatures rise four or five, six degrees Celsius over today's values. And so that scenario has been built into the US National Climate Assessment. It's been built into central bank stress testing. And the problem is we're not on that path.

How do we know we’re not on that path?

RP: Well, we experts know because of a guy named Justin Richie, one of my colleagues did the first most important work on this, but it assumes the sort of fanciful things that the average person can understand are not going to happen.

So right now around the world, there's something like 6,000 coal plants. This scenario assumes that we're going to build 30,000 more by 2100. That's not happening. India and China can go to town building coal plants. They're not going to build 30,000. This scenario was based on a theory from the 1990s about how energy systems develop and multiply, and that theory has proven to be wrong in this case. So it's pretty easy to show.

I mean, just in the last, I would say, five or six years as I've been writing about this, I've seen the scientific community going from, "No, no, we're denying it. We're still on that business as usual path." Today, pretty much everybody accepts that, no, that scenario is no longer plausible.

So it's an interesting thing because the scientific community knows this, understands this and has a general consensus about it, but it hasn't really snuck out of the scientific community into the more popular discourse or policy or... The political world's starting to realize this. It'll be interesting to see what happens in the next few years.

Why is RCP 8.5 so prominent in climate science?

RP: A group of billionaires got together about a decade ago. They started a project called the Risky Business Project, and it was basically... I mean, it's very fashionable for billionaires to dabble in the climate space, but basically what they did is they funded a bunch of research promoting and using RCP 8.5, and this was really what was brilliant about what they did.

They didn't just produce a glossy report in a website and win the news cycle for a day or two. They funded researchers to go to scientific conferences and to publish their research in scientific journals. And that helped. It's not the cause of RCP 8.5, but it was a little bit like pouring gasoline on a fire. It really helped really eat all of climate science over the last decade.

Does RCP 8.5 have any real use?

RP: It is an apocalypse scenario and it has scientific uses, right? Because if you want to do climate modeling and you want to separate out a forced signal of human impact from natural variability, then of course you want to use the most extreme scenario. That's useful for scientists. The problem is when you try to connect that science to policymaking, planning, budgeting. The fact that it's implausible becomes really, really important.

Is the scientific community aware that RCP 8.5 is not going to happen?

RP: As the scientific community has become increasingly aware and has admitted that this scenario is implausible, one of the storylines that's promoted is, "Well, look, all of the climate policies we've put in place have gotten us off that path. We used to be on it and now we're not." And that's just not true.

But here's one puzzling thing, because if you actually tell people, "Yeah, we're on this very extreme path, then the costs of mitigation," the cost of energy policy changes are going to be so much more because you have to alter course in a much larger way than if we are on a more realistic lower path.

So it has the advantages in political debate of saying, "Oh, look at this apocalyptic world," but it also disfavors policy. So it is a double-edged sword, I think, for activists.

What does successful climate policy actually look like?

RP: The reality is, and this is an argument I've made for a long time, that successful climate policy is always going to be incremental and it's going to be incremental when the actual benefits to the people who have to support it, so the publics around the world, are realized on political timescales.

In the United States, that's two, four and six years. And we can set a direction of travel, but no one knows what the energy technologies of 2100 or 2050 or 2035 are going to be. And so, it's a little bit like everything else we do in policy and politics in messy democracies, is we take first steps and then we see where we're at.

Does it matter who the president is for lowering emissions?

RP: Since 2005, which is the baseline year the US government uses for climate policy, it's been an almost linear decrease. The global financial crisis had a dip and then there was a rebound. The pandemic had a dip, there was a rebound. But the data suggests that presidents really don't matter for emissions reductions during their time in office. If you want to understand why US emissions have gone down so much since 2005, you have to go back to the Ford presidency and look at energy policy put in place there that helped over 30, 40 years stimulate technologies of fracking. And really fracking in the 2000s, 2010s helped to displace coal. There were other policies put in place, but really energy policymaking has impacts that are measured in decades after presidential libraries are built.

And so, the Biden administration has some kind of a Teflon magic quality, because under the Biden presidency, the US has seen record oil and natural gas production. And at the same time, just recently, he's talking about increasing tariffs on solar panels and electric vehicles by something like a factor of four, which means it's going to be more expensive for people to take them up in the United States, slowing down decarbonization. And I have to think if we had a Republican president right now instead of a Democrat, then people would be howling about the oil production and the tariffs. The other fact is under the Inflation Reduction Act, which we could call a big part of it's a climate act, the Biden administration is not even going to close to its desired emissions reduction targets. And again, this is something nobody talks about, but I would think that maybe in December it will be okay to talk about how far off the US is from those 2030 targets.

As the world wakes us to the true costs of net zero, should we be thinking more about cheaper and lower-emitting energies like nuclear and natural gas?

RP: I think you put your finger on what I think is the big tragedy of climate policy. Climate policy is really about energy policy when we talk about mitigation, and energy policy has a lot of importance beyond climate, energy costs, accessibility, affordability, U.S. security, geopolitics. At some point, both the left and the right decided that, "Hey, this climate issue really gets our base riled up," people on the far left and people on the far right. Everything for the climate or nothing for the climate. The reality is that for the foreseeable future, any commonsense, practical energy policy, even if we're trying to dramatically reduce emissions, is going to be an all-of-the-above policy.

One of the most shocking things about the Biden administration's recent energy policy decisions is the liquefied natural gas pause. Whether it actually becomes implemented or not after the election remains to be seen. For me, the most shocking thing were the statements that came out of Japan and Europe that indicated that they hadn't been alerted or had even discussed the LNG pause. As Europe is shifting from Russian gas to other sources and Japan is looking to close its coal plants and rely more on natural gas, it's more than a climate issue. It's more than an election issue. It's an issue of U.S. national security and the security of the U.S. allies.

Can we stop climate change and stop the growth of the temperature of the earth at an acceptable economic cost?

RP: Yeah, yeah, I hear you. If you take a look at the emissions of carbon dioxide per unit of GDP ... this is called the carbon intensity of our economy ... that has actually been going down for as long as we can measure, because we get more efficient in our economic activity and we have a tradition, even without climate policy, of switching from dirtier to cleaner fuels. If you move from coal to natural gas, for example, you cut out about half of the carbon. If you just take that linear trend that we have been on since at least the 1960s and we keep that rate up, we're going to hit net zero at about 2080.

So is the best way to lower emissions just to stay on our current past? Is that the real “do-nothing” scenario?

RP: We already spend trillions of dollars on energy and energy investments, capital investments and efficiency gains. It doesn't happen by magic. This is one of the things I try to impress upon people, is that the so-called do-nothing strategy is actually understanding how that innovation got us to where we are today and figuring out how to keep it going. The energy economy, depending on how you measure it, is something like 10% to 15% of global GDP. It's enormous. It's incredible. In the energy-rich world, it gets us all the bountiful things that we enjoy. There are going to be people who want that everywhere in the world. There's three, four, five billion people who don't have that.

The do-nothing strategy is actually a do-an-awful-lot strategy. My argument is it's going to cost a lot to keep energy progress going, so we should be smart about it.

Are you concerned about climate scientists becoming climate activists?

RP: That's a good description of the current struggle across a lot of areas of science right now. I have a lot of friends and colleagues that are in the climate space and they're wonderful people, but the fact of the matter is the climate space is not particularly representative of anything other than rich, Western, male academics who lean very far to the left. I wrote recently about a study that explored views of degrowth among climate researchers who published in the IPCC, and a shocking number ... I don't remember, like 30 to 40% ... were advocates of degrowth…

Before you continue, can you explain to us what “degrowth” is?

RP: Degrowth is the theory that in order to deal with climate change, governments need to limit or reduce the size of economies, so people become poorer and mainly in the rich world. So no flying on airplanes and no ice cubes to quote one IPCC leader. It's a problem because a lot of the work the IPCC does is it's science, it's impacts, it's economics, but it's not politics and it's not policy. There's no politician that I'm aware of on planet Earth who has ever won election on a platform of degrowth. We're going to make everybody poorer. That doesn't go over well. So there is this challenge of how do we get good science that is socially robust when the members of the scientific community producing that science have a narrow slice of political views that are at odds with most people in the countries they live or around the world. That is a challenge.

How much should we be considering the climate when developing policy?

RP: Climate has grown as an issue. So that in some instances subsumes everything else. And in many issues, climate is not a particularly significant factor. And I think national security is one of those. I find it hard to believe that people in the Biden administration today don't fully understand that it's better for US interests if the US is the world's largest supplier of liquefied natural gas.

Because if the US doesn't supply, it's going to come from Qatar or it'll come from Russia. It'll come from somewhere else. And we've learned over the last almost a century what happens when the US becomes reliant on energy supplies outside the US borders. So there are issues for which... And let me say expanding the use of natural gas globally to the extent it can be used to reduce coal, also reduces emissions. It's not solving the whole issue, but it does move us in the right direction. Another one, nuclear power.

The US would be well-served to be the source of nuclear energy for the 21st century because Southeast Asia, the continent of Africa are all going to be expanding electricity consumption going forward. And that's going to come from somewhere. And so it's one of those things that I have a PhD in political science, but I'm still baffled how governments, not just the US, but Germany, Japan for a period, though they're coming to their senses, decided to abandon the expansion and improvement of nuclear energy. I mean, that's no-brainer if there ever was one.

Read the transcript here.

SHOWNOTES

Biden’s big bet hits reality (Politico, May 8, 2024)

Biden administration races to safeguard environmental rules from congressional axe (Reuters, April 24, 2024)

Biden seeks to accelerate the EV transition in biggest climate move yet (The Washington Post, March 20, 2024)

Biden backtracks on climate plans and ‘walks tightrope’ to court both young voters and moderates (The Guardian, March 8, 2024)

Biden pauses LNG export approvals after pressure from climate activists (Reuters, January 26, 2024)

Biden to Target Industrial Pollution in a 2nd Term, if He Gets One (New York Times, September 16, 2023)

Do U.S. Presidents Matter for Carbon Dioxide Emissions Reduction? (Roger Pielke Jr., The Honest Broker, April 29, 2024)

The Politics and Policy of a National Climate Emergency Declaration (Roger Pielke Jr., The Honest Broker, April 18, 2024)

Climate Cooking (Roger Pielke Jr., The Honest Broker, April 13, 2024)

How Climate Scenarios Lost Touch With Reality (Roger Pielke Jr. and Justin Ritchie, Issues, Summer 2021)

Roger Pielke Jr.: I am Under 'Investigation' (Roger Pielke Jr., Financial Post, February 25, 2015)

Europeans Ditch Net Zero, While Biden Clings to It (Joseph Sternberg, Wall Street Journal, May 2, 2024)

The Biden EPA’s Plan to Ration Electricity (Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal, April 26, 2024)

Joe Biden’s limits on LNG exports won’t help the climate (The Economist, February 1, 2024)

I Left Out the Full Truth to Get My Climate Change Paper Published (Patrick T. Brown, The Free Press, September 5, 2023)