Thread by @AukeHoekstra

I just read a really well researched article titled:

"Climate change is not going to be THAT bad:
how a disaster scenario got the upper hand."

Since it's in Dutch I thought I'd do a thread about it but you can also try Google translate.
volkskrant.nl/wetenschap/zo-…

It was written in the Dutch quality newspaper de @volkskrant by @mkeulemans who's twitter motto resonates with me: "Wherever and whenever you can, count". He interviewed multiple scientists and looked how climate change was depicted in the Dutch media.

Will rice yields plummet by 40%?
Emperor penguin die out?
Will 1/6th of sea life die?
And many others.

Reading newspapers you would think: surely!
In reality it's very unsure it will be that bad.

Senior scientist @DetlefvanVuuren explains many assumptions are based on a scenario in which we turn to coal and the world population grows to 12 billion (not 11 billion as now assumed). He calls this scenario unlikely with current insights. It's official name is RCP 8.5.

RCP stands for Representative Concentration Pathway.

8.5 stands for an extra forcing of 8.5 W/m2.

This number basically indicates how bit the push is humanity will have given to climate change in the year 2100.

Other RCPs are 6.0, 4.5 and 2.6.

That van Duuren calls RCP 8.5 unlikely might seem remarkable since his research group conceived it. However - as he also explained in his oft cited paper on the topic - they just created 4 scenarios: high, medium (2x) and low and gave no probabilities.
link.springer.com/article/10.100…

He thinks that at the time of their creation, these scenarios gave a good spread and tells he was mostly criticised for including the lower scenarios. But fortunately, developments in the last ten years have made RCP 8.5 less likely.

Last year our CO2 emissions even stopped rising completely reported the @IEA iea.org/articles/globa…, mainly because we used much less coal than expected.

(IPCC author and soon @TUeindhoven prof @HeleendeConinck also sees this trend but warns coal has strong political support.)

Unfortunately, other scientists did not properly describe RCP 8.5 as the high scenarios it always was but called it business as usual.

This is now the case for at least 1200 and probably 12 000 papers as prof Roger Pielke Jr detailed many times. forbes.com/sites/rogerpie…

By the way: Roger Pielke Jr is often critical of climate change warnings and I often disagree with him but he has now been shut out of twitter for reasons I find questionable. I think it's partly because he often criticises the misuse of RCP 8.5. forbes.com/sites/rogerpie…

I am also blacklisted by some scientists for this reason and came into this this discussion (pitmonticone.github.io/rcp85-debate/d…) because people wanted to blackball my buddy @MLiebreich for claiming #RCP85isbollox. So there is a lot of resistance to this. But back to the newspaper article.

Another professor Roderik van der Wal admits that it's unlucky and a bit lazy that RCP 8.5 became business as usual. But he also did it. In an IPCC report he dust co-authored on oceans. ipcc.ch/srocc/

Here's another ocean report based on RCP 8.5 portals.iucn.org/library/sites/…

One of my personal heroes is a young PhD that was one of the first to call this out explicitly: Justin Richie @jritch.
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

He told me it was extremely hard to get his views publish and he stopped pursuing an academic career for that reason.

But he's still active and the tide may be turning. He recently published a great blog together with the omnipresent @hausfath thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/…
(I'm proud it contains an update the solar analysis in my pinned tweet to support things are looking up.)

And Zeke Hausfather went a step further and together with the equally omnipresent @Peters_Glen he published the criticism on RCP 8.5 in Nature which makes it pretty official and in your face in academia. nature.com/articles/d4158…

So maybe things are about to change.

I've not done the article justice. It contains a lot of original research: many links to Dutch headline news that turned out to be based on RCP 8.5. So *do* read the article if you are Dutch or are comfortable reading a Google translation.
volkskrant.nl/wetenschap/zo-…

I would like to close by making very clear that even 3 degrees of warming is a MAJOR problem and we are not doing enough to fight it.

But fight needs hope so we need more realistic scenarios that show us how we can successfully combat climate change, not just gloom and doom.

Just want to add this to my thread. The journalist himself tells me that he was triggered to write this because of a tweet of mine in december! I feel SO happy now!

I doubted if I should touch this 'third rail', but this alone makes it worth it!

https://twitter.com/mkeulemans/status/1233510340043902976?s=20

For the record (and pls. see other replies here) it seems it was not as clear cut as Pielke implies. My guess is he got a temporary ban (not neccesarily undeserved) and then deleted his account.

And I agree he is an agitator. But he regularly makes solid points too imo.