🧵
Today IOC released a new Framework on Fairness, Inclusion & Non-discrimination on the basis of gender identity & sex variations olympics.com/ioc/news/ioc-r…
This offers a sharp rebuke to World Athletics "Semenya Rule" barring certain women from competition without medicating
The IOC prioritizes the prevention of harm
The World Medical Association @medwma opposes the World Athletics "Semenya Rule" because of its harm to athletes
No more need be said on this topic
IOC comes out against sex testing of athletes - Good
Yet the WADA Anti-Doping Code was recently modified in light of the "Semenya Rule" to allow drug tests to be used for gender verification
This is wrong
IOC says athletes should be prevented from claiming a gender identity "different from the one consistently are persistently used"
So is it OK for a sport federation to classify an athlete's gender identity to be different than the one they "consistently and persistently use"?
🤷♂️
IOC says no athlete should be excluded based on a perceived advantage
This undercuts the entire CAS judgment against Semenya, which was grounded only in a perceived advantage (and earlier rejected as such in Chand CAS judgment)
And here is the kicker
IOC says "any restrictions arising from eligibility criteria should be based on robust and peer-reviewed research"
The "Semenya Rule" is based on research admitted to be flawed by WA & putatively (but not) fixed in a non-peer-reviewed letter
Wow IOC
But wait there's more
IOC is against medically unnecessary procedures or treatment to meet eligibility criteria
The WA "Semenya Rule" is centered on medically unnecessary procedures to meet eligibility criteria
IOC against invasive examinations
WA requires them
Again, wow IOC
IOC supports an athlete's right to privacy
But as we saw in Tokyo the WA "Semenya Rule" cannot by design protect privacy, in fact the opposite as we saw in headlines around the world
IOC calls for informed consent when collecting data used for sex or gender testing
But the linkage of sex testing with anti-doping makes this currently impossible
IOC calls for periodic review of eligibility criteria
Since the "Semenya Rule" went into effect there has been no such review, despite the research underpinning the rule being corrected by the journal that published it & WA admitting that it was misleading
Bottom line:
The new IOC Framework provides about a dozen reasons to rethink the World Athletics "Semenya Rule" (as if we needed even more)
This is a significant development
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
Climate cost-benefit analyses are going to look very different when the question is not from below: “what bad things happens when we exceed 1.5C?” But instead, from above: “what benefits will we see if we return to 1.5C?”
What happens if the world warms another 0.4C (from 1.1C today to 1.5C within a decade or so) and the world looks a lot like it does today?
Future temperature targets offer the political asset of uncertain impacts
Once those targets are exceeded that uncertainty goes away
Consider:
The 1970s global average surface temperatures were about 1C less than today … no one I am aware of is making the case that the climate of the 1970s is one we should try to return to (for obvious reasons, 1970s were a decade of many global extremes)
🚨Important🚨
A new independent validation of our normalization methods & result
Alstadt, B., Hanson, A., & Nijhuis, A. (2022). Developing a Global Method for Normalizing Economic Loss from Natural Disasters. Natural Hazards Review, 23(1), 04021059. ascelibrary.org/doi/full/10.10…
A "normalized" record of disaster losses asks what damage would occur if past extreme events occurred with today's societal conditions
Over many decades, climate changes and varies, of course
But society also changes on that timescale as well
So normalization is needed
🍎to🍎
Alstadt et al 2022 (AHN22) seek to "to develop a global approach to normalize past exposure to current levels using the value of capital stock" rather than GDP
We agree 100%
Where available we have always used capital stock in our normalization studies (eg hurricanes, tornadoes)
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
The biggest news in the Global Carbon Budget 2021 is a very large downward revision in CO2 emissions from land use
The downward revision is about the same size as the total emissions of CO2 from fossil fuels from the EU17 or India
Of course caveats about uncertainties . . .
Compared to when I went to sleep last night, our perception of the magnitude of the net-zero challenge just improved (it is stull huge, but less huger than we thought)
I'm lecturing in class today on this brilliant paper by Mike Hulme
"Climate reductionism is the means by which the knowledge claims of the climate modelers are transferred, by proximity as it were, to the putative knowledge claims of the social, economic, and political analysts"
Hulme observes, correctly, that climate reductionism can be found in the scenarios of the IPCC which fix society and vary climate ... this is common in the climate impacts literature (eg, when adaptation is ignored)
We see climate reductionism in the IPCC15 report where societal impacts of 1.5C are compared to 2C (as reported yesterday by NYT below)
Little known is that almost all of these differences in impacts occur under scenarios that ignore human adaptation ... as if