First, let me express nothing but support for young people engaging in political advocacy & trying to make the world a better place
My advice to young people about advocacy is the same as it is to scientists ... know what you are doing and why
So let's take a look at their WHY
JSO says
"Humanity is on the verge of an abyss, accelerated human induced climate change will destroy human civilisation unless emergency action is taken to rapidly reduce our Greenhouse Gas Emissions (GHG) to zero in a very short timescale" juststopoil.org/wp-content/upl…
It's understandable that if a group truly holds millenarian beliefs they are going to act out in radical ways
They literally believe that "Further expansion of oil and gas production globally is putting us on course for human extinction"
It's a sad statement of what we experts have done to young people
It is chock full of hyperbole from authoritative figures, references to work of the "planetary boundaries" folks & RCP8.5 studies
The below from their preamble
What literature do they cite to support their millenarian, apocalyptic views?
They cite a lot from the commentaries on "planetary boundaries"
We responded to last week to these folks pushing back against their calls for even more apocalyptic focus in research
Of course, the "tipping points" commentary cited by JSO earned an all-time correction for misleading its readers about risk
And most of their references to the scientific literature to justify their doomed outlook lead to - what else - RCP8.5 studies
The JSO manifest dismisses the IPCC report based on a Washington Post article that quotes a number of scientists dissatisfied with the IPCC and then asks, ironically enough: "What danger is there in being overly alarmist on the subject?" washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/…
So good job everyone
Efforts to undermine the IPCC, climate science & elevate the prospects of a near-term apocalypse have borne fruit, at least w/ this group
Climate change is real, serious & vigorous policy action makes sense
A Frankenstein dataset results from splicing together two time series found online
Below is an example for US hurricane damage 1900-2017
Data for 1980-2017 was replaced with a different time series in the green box
Upwards trend results (red ---)
Claim: Due to climate change!
The errors here are so obvious and consequential that it is baffling that the community does not quickly correct course
The IPCC AR6 cited a paper misusing the Frankenstein hurricane loss dataset to suggest that NOAA's gold standard hurricane "best track" dataset may be flawed
JFC - Using flawed economic loss data to suggest that direct measurements of hurricanes are in error!
We’ve reached the point where an IPCC author is openly rejecting the conclusions of the IPCC out of concern over how their political opposition is correctly interpreting the AR6
The integrity of the IPCC on extreme events is now under attack
The IPCC explains that a trend in a particular variable is DETECTED if it is outside internal variability and judged with >90% likelihood
For most (not all) metrics of extreme weather detection has not been achieved
That’s not me saying that, but IPCC AR6
The IPCC also assesses that for most (but not all) metrics of extreme weather the signal of a change in climate will not emerge from internal variability with high confidence (ie, >90%) by 2050 or 2100, even assuming the most extreme changes under RCP8.5
The US National Academy of Sciences has a new study committee on Extreme Event Attribution
Among its sponsors are the Bezos Earth Fund and Robert Litterman
Who are they? . . .
The Bezos Earth Fund sponsors World Weather Attribution, an advocacy group promoting the connection of weather events w/ fossil fuels in support of press coverage & lawsuits
Robert Litterman is on the board of Climate Central which founded WWA & collaborates on climate advocacy
The fact that a NAS committee is funded by political advocates is crazy enough
But that is not all
On the committee itself are individuals from two climate advocacy groups
One . . . the Union of Concerned Scientists which is working to use attribution to support lawsuits . . .
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