The Good News On Climate

Roger Pielke Jr on the actual state of climate science as of 2024, with a nod to John Kerry for recognizing the reality of the consensus, as accepted by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is quite different from the media and NGO consensus, as well as quite different from President Biden's frequent assertion that the climate crisis is "the existential threat to human existence as we know it" (November 21, 2021, though you can see a similar statement from the president from earlier this month).

In the video below, Pielke discusses why the the current consensus is a temperature increase of 2-2.5 degrees Celsius by 2100 from a 1850-1900 baseline, of which half that increase has already occurred.  He explains why climate scenarios were so far off, and the growing disconnect between the science and what is being presented in the media and elsewhere as a threat to human existence.

The temperature increase will pose problems, but it is a manageable one with the right policies in place, and does not pose a threat to human existence.

The presentation starts at 29:40 and runs for about 12 minutes.  And extra added bonus - the first speaker, Steve Hayward, at 18:35 mentions The State of the Nation's Ecosystems report, a product of the Heinz Center, for which I served on the advisory board.

  The scenario problem that Roger addresses was the subject of a previous post, Changing Climate, in which I go into more detail on not only how the scenarios originated, but how the least plausible one has been, and continues to be, deliberately and unethically used to scare the public.  Please don't fall for the continued stream of dire news articles on climate because they are all based on studies using RCP 8.5, the unrealistic scenario which has diverged so much from reality that it will be completely discarded soon - at least in the IPCC world.

Along those lines, YouTube has added an explanatory note to the video above on Climate Change which links to the UN's Climate Action website which contains quite a bit of disinformation and hyperbole.