In my email today
Climate industrial complex

RCP8.5➡️peer reviewed research➡️aggressive media campaign➡️apocalypse coverage➡️fundraising

Non-profit Climate Central CEO made ~$325,000 in 2019 & 7 other employees bt $170k-$270k (IRS 990)

8 people's salaries are >30% of spending
How much should a non-profit CEO be paid?
For a non-profit of CC size (~$5m in expenses in 2019) $131k-178k

Source: analytics.excellenceingiving.com/2020-2021-nonp…

What's the difference between a for-profit climate analytics firm & a non-profit one, both living off of RCP8.5? 🤷‍♂️
I'm all for people making good money
Especially when they have paying clients for their services
But non-profit expectations are (and should be) different

Don't even get me started on sports organizations!
The climate community has benefited/suffered (depending on your view) from a remarkable lack of oversight & scrutiny

Climate appears to be a Teflon coating that keeps away investigative journalists, pesky professors & others who might ask questions normal in most other settings
There is a complex ecosystem of academic (Climate Impact Lab), non-profit (Climate Central) & for-profit (Jupiter) groups that churn out reports, studies & advocacy

Much like many other topics

They sometimes share funders but they almost universally share a passion for RCP8.5

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More from @RogerPielkeJr

15 Oct
Latest haul of RCP8.5 headlines
Catnip for the climate beat and utterly irresponsible Image
The same group did the same analysis with the same conclusions based on RCP8.5 in 2015

Rinse, repeat

The exploitation of shoddy, inattentive peer-review processes by climate advocacy groups is extremely well done

Props to their cleverness
But that really shouldn’t happen
Some text peer reviewers can use when reviewing RCP8.5 (& similar) studies:

“RCP8.5 may have appropriate uses as an extreme, exploratory, implausible scenario, but it is absolutely and undeniably inappropriate to use to generate plausible or likely projections of the future.”
Read 5 tweets
1 Oct
Reading IPCC AR6 today

Interesting: Emergence of climate response defined as a difference between RCP8.5 (7.0) and RCP2.6 (1.9)

Dramatically shortens emergence time scale

Taking RCP4.5 as BAU would instead mean effects of "strong mitigation" not detectable for many decades
More
The climate benefits of mitigation are largely detectable in the late 21st century
More IPCC on detection of effects of mitigation
Read 5 tweets
1 Oct
Trans athletes

The idea that single values must be chosen (eg, inclusion OR fairness, pick one!) is to fundamentally misunderstand how decisions are actually made⬇️

Sport balances all sorts of values in competition

Consider Rugby:
Safety vs contact
Rules seek to balance these
The new UK Sports Councils report is a nice ink blot for passionate advocates on the far sides of the debate (ie, the blanket exclusion vs blanket inclusion folks), but it mostly just restates where the issue is currently at

theguardian.com/sport/2021/sep…
Reports @seaningle
"The long-awaited report argues there is no magic solution which balances the inclusion of trans women in female sport while guaranteeing competitive fairness & safety"

Of course

There is no "magic solution" in Paralympic classification either, but we do it
Read 4 tweets
1 Oct
Very odd

In the NYT David Keith takes on the IPCC, FCCC & makes the case that carbon removal or (his preference) geoengineering be deployed to cool the climate beyond a 2 or 1.5 C deg temperature target
nytimes.com/2021/10/01/opi…
The IPCC AR6 weighted in on geoengineering, finding that it would lead to "substantial residual and overcompensating climate change" & we have "low confidence in our understanding"

The idea that it should be central to climate policy is a fringe view
If the goal of the FCCC in international climate policy is to hold GAST to <2 deg C (or 1.5 deg C) - demarcating "dangerous anthropogenic interference" - then contrary to Keith's claims, achieving net-zero CO2 meets that goal ... so says IPCC
Read 5 tweets
30 Sep
Found in paragraph 27:

"Although the 2020 and 2021 hurricane seasons seem exceptional in our lifetimes and models portend an ominous future, researchers cannot attribute the increased activity to climate change yet"
washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/0…
The evolving science of hurricanes & climate change defies efforts to create simple narratives
That is OK

It is complicated, characterized by a background of large variability on all time scales & lots remain unknown (and maybe unknowable)

Sometimes certainty isn't possible
Many don't realize if we can detect/attribute TC behavior to human forcing in 2021, that means climate models are badly wrong
See: Crompton et al 2011. Emergence timescales for detection of anthropogenic climate change in US tropical cyclone loss data. ERL
iopscience.iop.org/article/10.108…
Read 4 tweets
23 Sep
Latest @BjornLomborg FACT CHECK 🧵

Climate Change Saves More Lives Than You’d Think by @BjornLomborg wsj.com/articles/clima… via @WSJOpinion
Assertions:

"Global warming does cause more heat deaths"
"Global warming now prevents more than 166,000 temperature-related fatalities annually"

Both of these are claims of attribution of causality

Such attribution is simply not possible ... I'll explain
Over 20 years 2000-2019 cold weather was associated with almost 10x the number of "excess deaths" than was hot weather

But that tells us nothing about the role of climate change, much less the effects of human caused climate change

doi.org/10.1016/S2542-…
Read 10 tweets

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