There is an interesting investigative journalism project to be done on the revolving door between climate science & policy and private sector climate services
Just as one example, John Kerry's predecessor as "climate envoy" co-founded a consulting firm that feeds off of RCP8.5
Absolutely fascinating how climate scenarios (RCPs, SSPs & their derivatives) are enabling entirely new markets for consulting based on financial risk assessments of fictional futures
It is also amazing how much money is being paid to explore these outdated, fictional futures
Observing the monetization of climate scenarios I am reminded of this passage from Rayner and Sarewitz 2021 @TheBTI Journal on how the Chesapeake Bay Program confused models and reality thebreakthrough.org/journal/no-13-…
The primary investor in Jupiter Intelligence (climate services based on RCP8.5) is Energize Ventures, a venture capital firm seeking to capitalize on the ongoing energy transformation
Good for them
But you can surely see how a consultancy promoting RCP8.5 is complementary
The "anchor partner" of Energize Ventures is Invenergy, a privately held energy company that operates >25 GW of wind, solar and natural gas facilities
Of course there is a cozy eco-system:
former gov't officials
scientists w/ specialized knowledge
venture capital
energy companies
current federal policy making
Has always been so
But it is interesting how these dynamics promote implausible scenarios & keep bad science going
There has been a lot of attention paid to the pathological dynamics of the energy-govt-science ecosystem related to fossil fuel interests, I have never seen similar critiques of the role played by non-fossil fuel interests
Low-hanging fruit for anyone wanting to look
/END
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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%