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Last month my op-ed in @FT on outdated climate scenarios of the NGFS used by central banks around the world to assess future climate risk & climate policy risk
I argued that the NGFS baseline scenario projected an implausible future for CO2 emissions ft.com/content/a82a7b…
Today the NGFS has published newly updated climate scenarios ... and guess what? I was correct and to their credit, they are moving their baseline scenarios in the right direction
Here is how the new NGFS baseline (red) looks compared to that which I critiqued as implausible (blue)
NGFS 2.0 has emissions growing to ~2080 and plateauing thereafter
This is a massive revision is just a short time frame
Good for NGFS
However, even with the massive revision (cumulative CO2 emissions from energy 2020-2100 lowered by ~18%), a case can still be made that the NGFS "current
policies = Hot House World 2.0" scenario is still too extreme as a baseline
Here is how it looks compared to HHW 1.0 as well as the range of plausible scenarios in Pielke et al 2021
Much better, but still extreme
The good news is that NGFS has added a second baseline "NDCs" that offers a more plausible baseline against which to perform stress testing and transition risk analyses ngfs.net/sites/default/…
Bottom line
Bravo to the @NGFS_ for recognizing that its scenarios were out of date & taking quick action to update them
PS. The NGFS methodology still has some serious problems
For instance the tropical cyclone damage function employed relies on Emanuel 2011 (based on our methods actually) that uses SRES A1b (like RCP8.5) plus a single model
Guess which model was selected to use from the below?
The tropical cyclone damage analysis of the NGFS cites Emanuel 2011 which is actually a follow-up to our paper:
Crompton et al 2011. Emergence timescales for detection of anthropogenic climate change in US tropical cyclone loss data. ERL, 6(1), 014003. iopscience.iop.org/article/10.108…
Our paper reports comprehensive results from CMIP3 model ensemble (so pretty dated), Emanuel's re-do of our analysis applies his bespoke methods (ignoring CMIP) & still arrives at similar results
Even so, cherry picks most extreme model results
This carried forward to NGFS 2021
Understanding scenarios in climate research and applications is ridiculously complex as there are scenarios nested within scenarios (within scenarios and so on), typically using assumptions that go back a decade or more
It is a troubling black box
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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
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"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%