Climate Cooking:  from Roger Pielke Jr.

Excerpts from Roger Pielke Jr.’s Substack

“How a few billionaires helped push climate science to the extremes“

Pielke Jr. starts with an update on his important work in challenging flawed narratives of catastrophe.

Happy Saturday! First, a few announcements. My paper, Scientific Integrity and U.S. “Billion Dollar Disasters” has passed peer-review and will soon be published in the new Nature journal npj Natural Hazards. You can read the as-accepted-draft of the paper at OSF, which I have just posted. On Tuesday at 2PM ET, I’ll be testifying at the House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Pandemic at a hearing titled, “Academic Malpractice: Examining the Relationship Between Scientific Journals, the Government, and Peer Review.” Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of Science is also scheduled to testify. I’ll post my testimony and reflections following the hearing, which you can watch here.

https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/climate-cooking

The rest of his post is an update to a 2020 article in Forbes.

I strongly recommend reading the piece in its entirety.

Introduction: The Genesis of a Narrative

Roger Pielke Jr.’s exposition reveals the origins and impacts of the influential RCP8.5 climate scenario, which has shaped much of contemporary climate research and policy. The narrative begins with Tom Steyer’s 2012 gathering, where leading environmental and political figures discussed strategies to make climate change a more palpable issue for the public through economic narratives.

The Billionaire’s Table and the Birth of a Strategy

At the center of the corruption of climate science discussed here sits a highly technical scenario of the future called Representation Concentration Pathway 8.5 or RCP8.5. Longtime readers of THB will no doubt be familiar with RCP8.5 and its consequences, but for anyone needing a quick primer, have a look at our short paper in Issues in Science and Technology.

Today, I add further details to this incredible story by explaining the important role in promoting RCP8.5 played by billionaires Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg.

The meeting, described as a turning point, was not merely a discussion but a strategic planning session that aimed to reframe climate change as an immediate economic threat. “Steyer was focused on the question: ‘How do you make climate change feel real and immediate for people?'” The outcome was a targeted approach to influence public perception and policy through economic impact studies, leading to the creation of the “Risky Business” project.

According to the New York Times, in November 2012, one month after stepping down from the hedge fund he led, Steyer gathered environmental leaders and Democratic party leaders around the kitchen table at his ranch in Pescadero, California. Among those in attendance were Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org, and John Podesta, who had founded the Center for American Progress (CAP) in 2003 to promote progressive causes.1 Today, John Podesta serves as President Biden’s “climate envoy,” recently replacing John Kerry.

At the 2012 kitchen table meeting, Steyer was focused on the question: “How do you make climate change feel real and immediate for people?” He was convinced by attendees that the best way to answer this question was by appealing to people’s pocketbooks, through the economics of climate impacts.

Following this meeting, Steyer invited two collaborators and co-funders to join him — One was Michael Bloomberg, then a political independent who was completing 12 years as the mayor of New York. The other was Hank Paulson, a Republican who was a former CEO of Goldman Sachs and who had also served as Secretary of the Treasury under George W. Bush.

Each of Steyer, Bloomberg and Paulson contributed $500,000 to the initial project, which had the goal of,

“making the climate threat feel real, immediate and potentially devastating to the business world”

Risky Business and the Misuse of RCP8.5

The core of the “Risky Business” report was to project the economic implications of the most extreme emissions scenario—RCP8.5—as the most likely outcome if no action was taken. This projection was fundamentally flawed, as it misrepresented RCP8.5 as ‘business as usual’ and suggested, erroneously, that policy changes could shift us from one RCP scenario to another. Pielke critiques this approach: “Both of these methodological choices were contrary to the appropriate use of the scenarios.”

The approach focused on characterizing the extreme RCP8.5 scenario as “the closest to a business-as-usual trajectory” and centered its economic analysis on that scenario:

“we focus on RCP 8.5 as the pathway closest to a future without concerted action to reduce future warming”

By focusing on the most extreme scenario as business-as-usual they guaranteed that the economic impacts of climate change that they projected into the future would be eye-poppingly large.

But in generating large economic impacts, the authors of the Risky Business report made two significant methodological mistakes. In addition to improperly characterizing the extreme RCP 8.5 scenario as “business as usual,” they improperly presented other scenarios of the IPCC as representing different policy outcomes, suggesting that we could “move” from one scenario to another: “

Moving from RCP 8.5 to RCP 2.6 (as well as RCP 4.5 and RCP 6.0) will come at a cost”

Both of these methodological choices were contrary to the appropriate use of the scenarios, according the modeling experts who created them, and who explained at the time:

“RCP8.5 cannot be used as a no-climate-policy reference scenario [”business as usual”] for the other RCPs because RCP8.5’s socioeconomic, technology and biophysical assumptions differ from those of the other RCPs”

The scenarios are completely independent from each other, and policy cannot “move” us from one to another. Consider that RCP2.6 represents a world with 3 billion less people than RCP8.5. The Risky Business methodology ignored such critical details while promoting a simple narrative.

Propagation Through Scientific and Media Channels

Dodgy science published by climate advocacy groups is certainly not uncommon and it is usually not that interesting. But the genius of the Risky Business project was that it did not stop with a flashy report aimed at the daily news cycle. It undertook a far more sophisticated campaign focused on introducing its methods into the mainstream scientific literature, where they would take on a life of their own.

For instance, soon after the initial Risky Business report was released in 2014 the Steyer-Bloomberg-Paulson funded work was the basis for 11 talks at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, which is the largest annual gathering of climate researchers.

The flawed assumptions of the “Risky Business” reports did not remain confined to a single project but spread through scientific literature and the media, influencing major assessments and policy decisions. This widespread adoption was facilitated by continued advocacy and publication in prestigious journals, despite the methodological errors. “The Risky Business analyses published in the scientific literature…influenced subsequent research and served as a basis for authoritative scientific reviews,” Pielke notes.

The next step was to get the Risky Business analyses published in the scientific literature where they could influence subsequent research and serve as a basis for authoritative scientific reviews, such as the U.S. National Climate Assessment.

For instance, a 2016 paper published in the prestigious journal Science from the Risky Business project featured the erroneous notion of moving from one RCP scenario to another via policy, comparing “business as usual” (RCP 8.5) and “strongest emissions mitigation” (RCP 2.6). That paper has subsequently been cited more than 1,100 times (as of April 2024) according to Google Scholar. Despite the obvious methodological flaw, the paper passed peer review and received little or no criticism. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of papers followed similarly in adopted the same assumption of “moving” between incommensurate scenarios.

…

The 2018 U.S. National Climate Assessment (NCA) offers a particularly notable example. The work initiated by the Risky Business project was cited almost 200 times in that report, including direct references to the project’s reports as well as the work of its lead consultant, the Rhodium Group. One of the lead researchers for Risky Business was also a lead author of the NCA. His research, supported by Risky Business, was cited more than 150 times in the NCA. Yet, nowhere that I have seen was it disclosed by the NCA that this lead author was under contract with the Rhodium Group from 2015 to 2022.

Pielke Jr. notes the subsequent creation of the Climate Impact Lab used to inundate the media with catastrophic alarmist stories.

• 1.5 million more people may die in India by 2100 due to extreme heat by climate change
• Rising sea levels could swamp major cities and displace almost 200 million people, scientists say
• Rise In Climate-Related Deaths Will Surpass All Infectious Diseases

All of these reports are based on the misuse of scenarios, and especially RCP8.5.

The Consequences of Misguided Methodologies

The article details how the misuse of RCP8.5 has permeated scientific literature, with over 6,700 academic papers incorrectly referencing it as ‘business as usual.’ This misuse has skewed the scientific and public understanding of climate risk, magnifying perceptions of threat and urgency in ways that may not align with the most likely scenarios.

According to my search of academic citations (using Google Scholar) more than 6,700 academic papers have used “business as usual” and RCP8.5 together since 2011. If each paper is cited 15 times, that would mean that more than 100,000 papers have cited papers that mistakenly refer to RCP8.5 as “business as usual” and many of these papers improperly compare other RCP scenarios as policy options.

Further, not only did the USNCA adopted the flawed methodology of the Risky Business projects, but so too has the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, most notably in its 2019 Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate. There is no doubt that climate science and policy have been profoundly influenced by the Risky Business campaign.

Of course, the Steyer-Bloomberg-Paulson investments were not entirely responsible for the misuse of scenarios in the scientific literature, but they are clearly an important part of the story.

Pielke Jr. notes the flawed (I would say ideologically corrupted) behavior of scientific institutions and media in the propagation of these exaggerated, to say the least, narratives of climate change threats.

The corruption of climate science occurred because some of our most important institutions have let us down. The scientific peer review process has failed to catch obvious methodological errors in research papers. Leading scientific assessments have ignored conflicts of interest and adopted flawed methods. The major media has been selectively incurious as to the impact of big money in climate advocacy on climate science, assessments, and policy.

Conclusion: The Imperative for Integrity in Climate Science

Pielke Jr. concludes with a call to restore integrity in climate science, highlighting the necessity of adhering to rigorous scientific standards irrespective of political or financial motivations. “We are going to need good science in the future—so it is best to keep it that way, no matter what cause it is enlisted to support,” he asserts.

Pielke Jr.’s article about RCP8.5 and the manufacturing of circular alarmist constructed narratives is not just about climate science; it’s about how science is used—or misused—to shape policy and perception. It serves as a cautionary tale of the power of narratives, the influence of money, and the critical need for vigilance in maintaining scientific standards.

Again, Pielke Jr.’s Substack is well worth a read.