If we get sucked into a “forest management” vs “climate change” framing Trump has already won the propaganda battle
Winning this debate (whatever that means) does not restore trust, legitimacy, competency or work against autocracy
It gets RTs & excites people
But don’t do it
I have no doubt that Biden & a future Biden administration will depart from Trumpian autocratic governance
That won’t be about mouthing appropriate words about “the science” but securing respect for expertise in federal agencies among elected & appointed figures and the public
The idea that Trump’s delegitimization of federal agencies & their expertise = Biden’s exaggeration of climate change is the false equivalency
They are not remotely comparable
Which is why I question Biden’s appeals to “the science” rather than going straight to competency
Of course Biden should play things straight on climate change — it is both tactically smart & the right thing to do
But more importantly, he should avoid getting trapped in a “forest management” vs “climate change” debate that feeds red meat to partisans but little else
Bottom line:
Central issue here is competency in governance — getting stuff done, like protecting people from hazards, responding to the pandemic, decarbonizing the economy
Pretending this is about “the science” gives Trump an easy win
It is about competency & autocracy
🙏
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We’ve reached the point where an IPCC author is openly rejecting the conclusions of the IPCC out of concern over how their political opposition is correctly interpreting the AR6
The integrity of the IPCC on extreme events is now under attack
The IPCC explains that a trend in a particular variable is DETECTED if it is outside internal variability and judged with >90% likelihood
For most (not all) metrics of extreme weather detection has not been achieved
That’s not me saying that, but IPCC AR6
The IPCC also assesses that for most (but not all) metrics of extreme weather the signal of a change in climate will not emerge from internal variability with high confidence (ie, >90%) by 2050 or 2100, even assuming the most extreme changes under RCP8.5
The US National Academy of Sciences has a new study committee on Extreme Event Attribution
Among its sponsors are the Bezos Earth Fund and Robert Litterman
Who are they? . . .
The Bezos Earth Fund sponsors World Weather Attribution, an advocacy group promoting the connection of weather events w/ fossil fuels in support of press coverage & lawsuits
Robert Litterman is on the board of Climate Central which founded WWA & collaborates on climate advocacy
The fact that a NAS committee is funded by political advocates is crazy enough
But that is not all
On the committee itself are individuals from two climate advocacy groups
One . . . the Union of Concerned Scientists which is working to use attribution to support lawsuits . . .
A time series of base (i.e., current-year) loses was first compiled from annual reports published in the Monthly Weather Review by Chris Landsea in 1989 for 1949-1989
I extended the data using same methods to 1996
Chris and I extended back to 1900 for Pielke and Landsea 1998
Then, Pielke et al. 2008 extend the dataset to 2005, again using the same methods
The heavy lifting was done by my then-student Joel Gratz
Joel graduated and went to an insurance company called ICAT . . .
Last month I revealed based on files part of the public record of the Michael Mann trial how Mann coordinated peer review of a paper of mine to ensure that it "would not see the light of day"
I only had a snippet of the relevant Mann email
Now I have the whole thing
And JFC...
First
New: the editor of GRL, Jay Familigetti, originally sent our submission to Mann!
That's right
A paper by Pielke & @ClimateAudit was sent to Mann to peer review
Mann wisely didn't accept but instead recommended hostile reviewers so that "it would not see the light of day"
@ClimateAudit Mann emails his partners Caspar Amann (NCAR) and Gavin Schmidt (NASA) to express his glee that this gives him an opportunity to cause harm
🧵
"The U.S. installed 1,700 miles of new high-voltage transmission miles per year on average in the first half of the 2010s but dropped to only 645 miles per year on average in the second half of the 2010s"
The US has 240,000 miles of high voltage transmission capacity
An expansion of 645 miles/year is just about 0.3%/yr
Take that 0.3%/year HV grid expansion to the next Tweet
The Princeton study (@JesseJenkins) used to promote the Inflation Reduction Act claimed the HV grid has been expanding at a rate of 1% per year based on a newsletter from JP Morgan
That 1% is >3x greater than actual recent grid expansion rates of 0.3%