🧵 @ISSUESinST several climate scientists & Marcia McNutt (@theNASEM pres) respond to @jritch & my recent article on misuse of climate scenarios, offering a unified defense of RCP8.5
First they defend RCP8.5 as "business as usual" stating that characterization "remains 100% accurate"
What to say? That's just wrong.
RCP8.5 depends on the building of >33,000 new coal plants by 2100, on top of current ~6,000
🤷♂️
Second, they appear to contradict themselves by stating that RCP8.5 was in fact "until recently" properly viewed as a plausible or even likely future
Again, this is objectively false
The world has never been on track for ~40,000 coal plants by 2100
Third, they also argue that the reality of RCP8.5 convinced the world to move away from it
RCP8.5 was never evaluated for its plausibility when created or used in many thousands of research papers, as we document
They claim its recognized failures now demonstrate its accuracy
Climate scientist @DrKateMarvel offers a different critique & in the process disagrees with Field/McNutt
She says RCP8.5 is not properly referred to as "business as usual"
Right, I had thought we were past this bit of semantics
Marvel states accurately that "even an unrealistic scenario can yield interesting science if used appropriately" (L)
Indeed, this is a puzzling critique because we make exactly the same point (R)
An issue she ignores is that much use RCP8.5 is inappropriate
Marvel ends on a political note warning that criticism of climate science aids the bad guys
Not sure the point of this - should we not be researching how scenarios are used and, yes, misused?
In a 3rd response NASA scientist @ClimateOfGavin & NASA strategic science advisor Peter Jacobs agree with much
They repeat a number of points we make about why climate scientists use extreme scenarios (e.g., to distinguish signal from noise in model runs)
They also agree on BAU
They blame the economic and energy modelers for being slow and unfunded, and that explains why the climate modelers have had to rely on implausible, dated scenarios
We suggest some other reasons, but at least we agree that scenarios are out-of-date
They also agree with us on a need to improve scenarios
Obviously if the "scientific community is already responding" then there must be an issue for them to be responding to, right?
They also highlight the new fad toward "scenario-free" climate research (a bad idea IMO)
After all those points of agreement (I actually missed any disagreement) they call our work "pointless and misleading"
😎
In sum:
1. RCP8.5 as BAU is entirely appropriate 2. RCP as BAU is incorrect but there are some scientific reasons for its use 3. RCP8.5 is dated, but the community is fixing it
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%