8.5

I've posted before about Roger Pielke Jr, climate change, the controversy over RCP 8.5, and my personal experience running a corporate greenhouse gas reduction program (see Changing Climate).

To recap, RCP 8.5 was a climate scenario developed by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) two decades ago.  The IPCC developed a set of scenarios and 8.5 posited the highest future emissions which, in turn, led to predictions of the highest increase in global temperatures. Almost from its inception it was criticized as being an unrealistic projection of global CO2 emission over the remainder of the 21st century.  Over the next two decades scenarios by the IPCC and other researchers focused disproportionately on RCP 8.5 leading to report after report showing significant increases in temperature due to human activities.  Many of those funding studies on climate change required researchers, as a condition of grants, to use the 8.5 scenario.  In recent year, thousands of studies have been published using 8.5, which are then seized upon by NGOs and the media to create a narrative.

The problem was that actual emissions were not trending as predicted by 8.5., nor was global temperature.  For many years the critics were ignored and attacked personally as "deniers", including Pielke.

Now the IPCC has announced that RCP 8.5 will not be used any longer and lower emissions scenarios substituted.  It is a good step but the process of getting to it is damning for the scientific community.

Pielke is a political liberal who agrees that emissions by humans are contributing to warming but he is also rigorous about examining evidence and calling out errors.  As climate "science" diverged more and more from reality in recent years he has become more adamant about calling out those who distort science in the name of advocacy and the atmosphere of enforced conformity within the climate community and much of the media.

In a recent post at his substack, The Honest Broker, Pielke calls the IPCC action "the most significant development in climate research in decades".   While the IPCC explains its change on the basis that "high emissions levels [of 8.5] have become implausible, based on trends in the costs of renewables, the emergence of climate policy and recent emission trends", Pielke and others, have for years, convincingly argued the 8.5 scenario was implausible from its inception.

In a more recent post, Pielke notes that the important change by the IPCC has been ignored by the English language media outlets most vested in creating the catastrophic climate change narrative like the New York Times, BBC, Science, and Nature. 

I highly recommend subscribing to Roger's substack.  While not agreeing with him on every policy issue, he has integrity, provides solid analysis, and goes where the evidence leads. 

Other recent Pielke posts include:

The Price of Partisan Advocacy by Scientific Institutions

The World's Most Important Science Advisory Committee

The Paper That Breaks Climate Economics

More Problems With the Federal Judicial Center Science Manual for Federal Judges