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
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
Latest haul of RCP8.5 headlines
Catnip for the climate beat and utterly irresponsible
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.”
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
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
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
"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…