The idea that any domestics policies are made at COPs is wrong
Domestic policies are made in legislatures, parliaments & power centers of sovereign nations
Paris corrected Kyoto’s flaw in this regard
Paris allows a public statement of pledges & reporting on progress
Many seem to believe that leaders of sovereign states can make policy, pledges or promises at COPs
They can’t
Don’t ask them to
Remember the goals of the Paris Agreement
To “strengthen the global response” since it, on its own is not a global response — action happens in sovereign nations
In pursuit of a higher order goal to limit global temperature increases to well below 2 C unfccc.int/sites/default/…
So what has Paris done?
Remarkably … it has now secured current pledges from nation’s around the world that would limit global T increase to 1.8C
Achieving that would be complete policy success under Paris
Pledges are not success, but pledges are all Paris can secure. . .
All of the actual policy action - meaning promulgation, approval & implementation of actual climate policies - occurs in between COPs & within sovereign states
Paris foresees this & is centered on a mechanism of reporting and accountability under what are called NDCs
In terms of securing pledges, the Paris Agreement has done its job
Shining a bright light on progress with respect to NDCs & even ratcheting them forward will continue to be important of course
But the center of gravity on climate policy is (and always has been) in nations
Now here is something to consider
With current pledges the 2C target is well in sight
Unlike death & taxes, pledges are not guarantees
But still, it is in sight
This helps to explain the mad rush by advocates to move the goalposts from 2C to 1.5C
Policy success is a concern
Accompanying the target shift has been a corresponding evolution of the threshold-of-catastrophe
Once it was 5C that was catastrophe, then 4C
Today the onset of catastrophe is often set at 3C
And some are even saying 2C is catastrophe
It won’t be long that 1.5C plays that role
There’s no problem with nation’s revisiting the Paris Agreement and reinterpreting 1.5C as a target rather than an aspiration
They haven’t yet
My advice is to move away from T target advocacy (abstract & inscrutable) and on to net-zero pledge advocacy (intuitive & obvious)
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
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%