An ICSF & Clintel Zoom presentation held on 27th October, 2021
Roger Pielke, Jr. describes himself as an “undisciplined professor” of science, policy and politics. He holds degrees in mathematics, public policy and political science, all from the University of Colorado. In 2006, Roger received the Eduard Brückner Prize in Munich, Germany, for outstanding achievement in interdisciplinary climate research. Formerly a Scientist at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research, in 2012 Roger was awarded an honorary doctorate from Linköping University in Sweden and was also awarded the Public Service Award of the Geological Society of America. He is also author, co‐author or co‐editor of seven books, including The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics, The Climate Fix: What Scientists and Politicians Won’t Tell you About Global Warming and The Rightful Place of Science: Disasters and Climate Change. His most recent book is The Edge: The War against Cheating and Corruption in the Cutthroat World of Elite Sports.
Abstract: In his lecture, Roger will give valuable insights on the recently‐released IPCC WG1 AR6 Report; describing it as a “code red for humanity” was not only wrong, it was irresponsible. Instead of apocalyptic warnings about “immediate risk” a top line message of this report should be: The Extreme Scenario that IPCC Saw as Most Likely in 2013 is Now Judged Low Likelihood, an incredible change in such a short time since the AR5 Report, which has not been highlighted by the media. Roger will also show that the IPCC has systematically and very helpfully gone through a large list of extreme‐weather phenomena in the detailed AR6 Report. Their results are quite surprising: floods, hurricanes, tropical cyclones, meteorological and hydrological droughts are not more frequent. Nor are tornadoes, hail, lightning or strong winds more frequent. However heatwaves are more frequent, as is extreme precipitation, and there are two other types of drought, namely agricultural and ecological drought, which have increased. It is very appealing, even seductive, for activists and the media to latch on to extreme events (as inaccurately summarized in the SPM), but at some point we have to say that objective science and its communication matters on this issue. This is a lecture and discussion of wide interest and is highly relevant in the lead‐up to COP26.
When someone is crying “wolf”, pointing out it looks like a chihuahua is not popular with those attempting to sell panic.
This is one of the most informative presentations I’ve seen here in a while.
Pielke has been skating on thin ice at the University of Colorado for some time. His propensity to get close to the truth contributed to preventing his return to CIRES after his stint in Sports Governance.
Now he’s a professor in the Environmental Studies Program where propaganda and communists rule.
https://www.colorado.edu/envs/
If meteorological and hydrological droughts are not more frequent, how can agricultural droughts increase? Is this due to increasing soil dryness?
Agricultural drought is in reference to soil moisture being low. (Meteorological drought is precipitation being low, hydrological drought is stream flow & groundwater being low, and socio-economic drought is water demand when the water supply is low.)
Here’s a paper, and a graph from it (except that I added the horizontal lines to the graph):
Global integrated drought monitoring and prediction system
Droughts can be deadly, but droughts do not kill by thirst, they kill by starvation. So what really matters is droughts’ impacts on food production.
Higher CO2 levels mitigate drought impacts by enabling crops to better withstand reduced water availability, by reducing plants’ moisture requirements. That’s one of the reasons that famines have become rare, for the first time in human history.
Here’s a relevant paper:
Effect of elevated carbon dioxide and water stress on gas exchange and water use efficiency in corn
EXCERPT: “There have been many studies on the interaction of CO2 and water on plant growth. Under elevated CO2, less water is used to produce each unit of dry matter by reducing stomatal conductance.”
Here’s a paper about how elevated CO2 benefits wheat:
Elevated atmospheric [CO2 ] can dramatically increase wheat yields in semi-arid environments and buffer against heat waves
Rising CO2 levels are helping to make famines rare for first time in human history. If you’re too young to understand how important that is, count yourself blessed! Famine used to be a scourge comparable to war & disease.
Compare:
● Covid-19 has killed about 0.063% of the world population, so far.
● The1918 flu pandemic killed an estimated 2% of world population.
● WWII killed about 2.7% of world population.
● The global drought & famine of 1876-78 killed an estimated 3.7% of world population.
When I was a child, horrific famines were often in the news, in places like Bangladesh. But Bangladesh and India now have food surpluses, every year. Rising CO2 level is one of the reasons for that.
https://ourworldindata.org/famines
If you look at that Global integrated drought monitoring and prediction system graph, it actually shows a slight decreasing trend in droughts. (It’s not very noticeable without the horizontal lines which I added.)
Three years ago I emailed Prof. AghaKouchak (one of the authors), and asked him about an updated graph. He replied, “It used to be near real-time product. But we only received short-term funding to maintain it.”
Does anyone think I am too cynical if I harbor a dark suspicion that they’d have had a better chance of getting their funding renewed if they’d reported that droughts were getting worse?
Plant stress due to agricultural drought can easily be mitigated by increasing atmospheric CO2 !!
Exactly right. Any discussion of drought and “carbon emissions” or “climate change” which fails to mention the long-established fact that elevated CO2 levels help mitigate drought impacts… is propaganda, not balanced scientific information.
https://twitter.com/ncdave4life/status/1454071943854964744
As long as I’ve been alive, someone has always been selling me fear about something or another, whether it be communists hiding under my bed or the horrors of eating white flour, or melting like the Wicked Witch of the West due to acid rain or air pollution.
But no matter what the issue happened to be, the one thing that always remained constant was that I couldn’t wait, the danger was imminent and I needed to take action immediately (or donate money) in order to bring peace, love and harmony back to my miserably impacted life.
I found out a long time ago that none of the fear mongers stories were ever destined to happen and simply refusing to buy the hype was the best path forward.
So when our elected officials tell me they now can control the weather by raising taxes and energy prices, but we cannot afford to wait another minute to do that in order to save the earth, excuse me when I call BS out of habit.
Apparently, we should be afraid of voracious flesh eating sand fleas.
In certain places in Australia, you need to be afraid of voracious flesh eating sand flies, certainly.
I know exactly where they are ! They hide out and wait for me at my weekender in Noosa, it explains the bites all over my legs. True story 😉
Funny you say that – in my backpacking days back in the late 1980s I still recount the sand fly attack on my legs that were under the picnic table in the sand we were sitting around most of the night. I counted over 80 bites per leg. The itch was maddening for several days afterwards!
Had the same experience at a Bobby McFerrin concert in Perugia.
The music more than made up for the itching.
Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal
Doonman, your last paragraph is spot on about the folly of climate engineering:
“when our elected officials tell me they now can control the weather by raising taxes and energy prices, but we cannot afford to wait another minute to do that in order to save the earth”
This would be very disappointing to the mindless zealots but it is highly unlikely they will see or read it. No one wants a lecture on objective facts and rational thought when in the throws of apocalyptic ecstasy. Emotion and sanctimony are fueling this movement, not reason.
So who will have access to this and actually read and understand it? The MSM holds the cards when it comes to propaganda.
Samizats helped take down the USSR
Is there a transcript?
I read about 5x the speed that people talk, if not faster.
Yes. Videos everywhere for everything and they are so darned slow. Whoever first decided that it was a good idea to make videos on how to use various software should be forced to watch Gilligan’s Island repeats until their brain melts. Give me the Father Guido Sarducci version, just the points you need to know one year from now.
Not only are they often very slow but there is often more irrelevant content (and time waste) than useful information. Skip the bedtime stories, please.
You’ve never heard kiwi.
watch it on YouTube and you can double the speed
Watch on Youtube, click on the …, and open transcript! Auto-generated….
For God’s sake, I still can;t understand why Pielke Jr. considers himself a believer in the climate scam. The whole climate science industry of the IPCC is chock-full of charlatans, lying PhD snake-oil sellers, carnival barkers and freak show scammers.
The entirety of the UN’s socialist climate scam needs to be chucked to the ditchand ignored by everyone, and then run over once or twice for good measure. Let the climate alarmists “pound sand” as Texas Gov Abbott said.
Not sure Pielke Jr is a believer in the “climate scam”
Like most sensible people, I accept recorded temperatures have risen since the LIA and I accept Man has a minor role.
CO2? Not so much
at the beginning of his video- he indicates in his bullet points that climate change is “serious”- sounds like part of the “climate scam” to me
Redge,
Is the minor role that man has played the result of poor siting of temperature recording devices and UHI effects as per Anthony’s earlier siting studies reflect?
Or is it the massaging (lowering) of PAST temperature data by multiple national (US, AUS, etc.) temperature data maintenance agencies?
Or is it changing the parameters of measurement methods without running the new and old long enough to show the effects of the changes?
Or is it burning of fossil fuels and changes in vegetation resulting in some very minor portion of the increase in atmospheric CO2?
Or is it all 4 or some other unlisted influences of man?
Just asking.
This is why I say recorded temperatures.
My understanding is your final sentence is correct.
IMHO, additional causes of temperature, most definitely caused by Mann, in no particular, order are likely to be:
Climate science is nothing to do with ‘socialism’ or any sinister re-ordering of the world. That’s just political fantasy.
The reality of observed changes in the world’s climate is the only important issue here and there is no denying that there IS a change and increasing adverse impacts.
Climate skepticism is a purely political movement.
“Climate skepticism is a purely political movement”.
Griff, that is a wonderful example of classic projection.
Play the video again, this time checking how many lines on the AR6 “Summary of Extremes” slide have a “no” entry in the “Detection” column.
Nobody “denies” that several billion smartphone cameras around the world have “detected” an increasing number of extreme weather events as they have happened over the last 15 or 20 years.
How has the “adverse impact” known as “people dying as a result of climate-related events” changed since the 1920s and 1930s ?
Hint : Roger Pielke Jr. has published some peer-reviewed papers on this subject …
Not only that, but most climate alarmists totally misinterpret the IPCC’s confidence levels. The IPCC’s “medium confidence” includes a 50-50 chance. In other words, when the IPCC says that there’s a medium confidence that a particular climate attribute has changed they’re really saying that they can’t tell one way or another. When they say “low confidence” they are really saying that the likelihood is that the change ISN’T happening. I believe that the IPCC uses this imprecise language to promote misinterpretation – as exemplified by griff getting almost everything completely wrong – like he’s always saying that flooding has increased when it hasn’t. My bet is griff didn’t watch the video – he’s worried that he will have to question his beliefs that are really politically based.
“I believe that the IPCC uses this imprecise language to promote misinterpretation”
I agree. That makes it easier for the alarmists to Con the public.
No, they are much more subtle than that.
From Box 1.1, “Treatment of uncertainty and calibrated uncertainty language in AR6”, on page 1-31 of AR6 :
– – – – –
I agree to a certain extent, but personally I tend more towards the “constant rewriting of the dictionary” school of theology.
Take a term — e.g. “climate change”, which everybody instinctively “knows” means the result of a mix of natural and man-made forcings on the Earth’s climate system — and redefine it to mean something else (“climate change = anthro-only forcings” in this case).
Watch as the “old fuddy-duddies” get confused as they continue to think in terms of the original (broad) definition when the “young firebrands” insist on using it in the new (much narrower) sense.
No, you”re misinterpreting their weasel wording. If a medium confidence includes a random chance that the change is happening, then a low confidence has less than a random chance. That means the opposite change IS more likely. There’s no other possibility. It’s true that the opposite doesn’t necessarily have a high chance but that’s just indicative of their lack of statistical confidence in most anything.
Gruff, when you say…”The reality of observed changes in the world’s climate is the only important issue here and there is no denying that there IS a change and increasing adverse impacts”
It’s right, right, wrong. Logical fallacy by extrapolation. There are no increasing adverse effects, rather the opposite is true. Changes in weather and climate are natural.
Griff,
What is rising most? Tmax’s or Tmin’s? Then tell us exactly what problems are caused by the one rising the most!!
He can’t do that because it would destroy his whole worldview
Griff writes “there is no denying that there IS a change and increasing adverse impacts.”
By what measure are there increasing adverse impacts?
There are plenty of measures of increasing benign impacts such as improving standards of living globally which includes many factors that might be considered impacted by climate change such as food production.
“The reality of observed changes in the world’s climate is the only important issue here and there is no denying that there IS a change and increasing adverse impacts.”
Hardly. Absent climate mitigation policies, the “observed changes in the world’s climate” would be relevant largely to academics. The “observed change” since the last half of the nineteenth century consists largely of a warming of very small magnitude compared to seasonal and daily temperature changes; and it has been accompanied by drastically *less* vulnerablity to weather in those countries fortunate enough to enjoy fossil-fueled industrialization.
Even if ECS were known and climate projection was a 100% accurate science, it would confer no certainty to the projection of *impacts*. And even if (unlike today) the net climate impact in the future were known to be significantly negative, it would not follow that mitigation policies now are a better policy choice than adaptation in the future. Currently proposed climate policies combine high costs with tiny impacts, and rely on near-universal adoption against interest by countries who have much more to gain by industrialization. I think there is a very small chance of that happening, and if it did happen it would be a tragedy.
griff,
Is the minor role that man has played the result of poor siting of temperature recording devices and UHI effects as per Anthony’s earlier siting studies reflect?
Or is it the massaging (lowering) of PAST temperature data by multiple national (US, AUS, etc.) temperature data maintenance agencies?
Or is it changing the parameters of measurement methods without running the new and old long enough to show the effects of the changes?
Or is it burning of fossil fuels and changes in vegetation resulting in some very minor portion of the increase in atmospheric CO2?
Or is it all 4 or some other unlisted influences of man?
Just asking.
Global warming alarmism IS a leftist scam, promoted by scoundrels and imbeciles.
Global cooling, not so much.
Cold weather kills ~20 times more people that hot weather.
I published 19 years ago that cooling would start about now.
It looks like i was correct. Unfortunately.
RECORD COLD HEADED FOR DELHI, -10C FREEZE TO BATTER BRITAIN, CALIFORNIAN SLOPES OPEN EARLY, + NEW YORK FORECAST SNOW NEXT WEEK
October 27, 2021 Cap Allon
At 44.7″, this is already Donner Summit’s second snowiest October in recorded history, and note: the area is just 1.9″ off the all-time record and with 5 ‘snowy’ days left to run.
“SCIENTIFIC COMPETENCE – THE ABILITY TO CORRECTLY PREDICT”
by Allan MacRae, B.A.Sc., M.Eng., October 2021
http://correctpredictions.ca/
I used to love Donner Summit’s; I feel love.
Just sent this note to our idiot-and-corrupt politicians and their “bought” media cronies.
This is what happens when green scoundrels and imbeciles set energy policy.
German Energy Prices “Going Through The Roof”, Supply Tightens As Leaders Botch Energy Policy
By P Gosselin on 23. October 2021
Political energy mismanagement in Germany now risks inflicting tremendous pain on citizens as energy shortages intensify and prices skyrocket. Coming winter of discontent?
Energy prices going through the roof
By Fritz Vahrenholt, first published at Tichys Einblick
(Translated/edited by Pierre Gosselin)
Prices for natural gas, coal, oil and electricity have been rising massively since the middle of the year. The price of a kilowatt hour (kWh) of electricity has almost tripled to 13 euro cents per kWh on the Leipzig wholesale electricity exchange.and the price of natural gas has increased fivefold.
Very strange indeed. This scam involves not just carnival barkers, but the FED, ECB, Carney, Prince Charles, BlackRock, and a $150 trillion sluice gate about to be opened – a financial dinosaur about to go extinct.
Either it is just plain fear or the smell of money.
Still, going through the IPCC reports is like following the Brontosaurus and picking diamonds out of the huge heaps of dung on the trail. Smelly work, if you can get it…
On the detection and attribution slide, there is no selection where an event detection is opposed in the attribution column.
Every event bears a negative phrasing. Where a bad thing hasn’t happened, curious that it’s not because of co2, but if it has, it is.
Coincidence that every non detected event is also not attributable?
Indeed. I challenge you to find even one climate alarmist, anywhere, who will credit any part of this trend to rising CO2 levels:
https://ourworldindata.org/famines
That big spike on the left was the global drought & famine of 1876-78, which killed an estimated 3.7% of the world’s population, when CO2 levels were 30.5% lower than now.
Imagine if something like that were to occur now. I promise you that the BBC and every “mainstream” media outlet would blame it on mankind’s “carbon pollution,” and use it to gin up demand for subsidizing more wind and solar energy boondoggles. Facebook & Twitter would censor anyone who dissented, and young professors would know to hide their doubts, lest they destroy their careers in academia.
In fact, even though large scale drought-triggered famines no longer happen, when a very small one threatens, the Beeb, TIME, and every other “mainstream” media outlet predictably and nonsensically blame it on “climate change,” and resolutely ignore all evidence to the contrary — and if you point how unscientific that is, you’re a “science denier.”
Dave. That comment should be entered into the world’s best comment championship. Such a well laid out point, with evidence, argument, and all relevant. Thanks.
I agree. Great comment.
I would note that the 1880’s show to be at the same level of warmth as the 1930’s, according to a NASA chart, so it was very warm around the 1880’s, and it should be no surprise that a big drought occurred as a result.
And this drought was “worldwide”, so the warmth was worldwide.
Well, a warm climate is not generally correlated with drought.
Americans (those who know their American history) tend to assume otherwise, because our “dust bowl” drought years were during the warm 1930s. But that’s actually a rather peculiar coincidence.
In fact, during the very warm Roman Warm Period, North Africa (esp. the Nile valley) was the “breadbasket of the Roman Empire.” When the world cooled, during the Dark Ages Cold Period, the North African climate became more arid, and the Sahara expanded.
It should also be understood that India went from massive famines in the early 1970s to food surpluses because of a simple change in economic policy: They lifted price controls on food. Anyone with a bit of economic knowledge would be able to predict an improvement in their situation.
Free Markets work every time they are tried.
What, they left socialism behind? Then things got better?
We are working, in the US, on doing the reverse. Even before the Democrat party implements their socialist dictatorial policies in full, they are having a noticeable effect on prices and supply just with the CONTROL they are imposing on the economy through China Virus dictates.
While driving through eastern Arizona we stopped at a Native American crafts sales business. The sign on the door stated “Masks required, no exceptions”. No problem, we just moved on. Knowing the propensity of the natives to be leftist, we didn’t stop to check out any the other such businesses. Sad thing is that at the beginning of the China virus, the native communities of NE Arizona had extremely high infection and death rates. The natives in that area have probably all been infected and are naturally immune by now.
Political it is.
Thanks for pointing that out, Max. I know that rising CO2 level isn’t the only reason they now have plenty of food, and I suspect you’re right that lifting price controls was the biggest single reason.
But the 28% increase in atmospheric CO2 (since 1970) has improved average crop yields by >10%, globally — and by considerably more than that under drought conditions. So that also surely helped make food more plentiful and inexpensive, not just on the Indian subcontinent, but just about everywhere in the world.
These photos are both from Bengal / Bangladesh, about 140 years apart:
Nobody reads the working group reports. The entire information that reaches the media comes from the SPM, which is written by climate emergency advocates and bears a tenuous relationship to the underlying report at best. For example, it ignores all the RCP scenarios except for the most extreme.
But it gets even worse. The media then write apocalyptic articles from it that make the SPM sound even worse than it is. This is all the public ever hear. Based on constant fearmongering like “climate emergency” and “mass extinction events”, the public become deranged with fear, and rush out to glue themselves to roads. And it’s all because nobody will ever read the working group reports. Certainly not the media “science” correspondents.
CO2 will continue to rise at 2ppm a year for the foreseeable future.
Good
And I hope it gets a bit warmer as well. But the two aren’t correlated so far.
We wish. Unfortunately strong negative feedbacks are removing CO2 from the air at an accelerating rate.
The higher the level goes, the faster those processes remove it. That fact, alone, should tell you that, unless CO2 emissions increase, the atmospheric CO2 concentration must eventually plateau. The “plateau level” is the level at which the removal processes are as fast as the emission rate.
At the current anthropogenic CO2 emission rate, that plateau level is only about 510 ppmv (which is only 29% of a doubling, which could cause only about 1/2 degree of global warming , a disproportionate part of which is at chilly high latitudes, which are obviously way too cold, so the warming would certainly be beneficial.)..
Even at 150% of the current CO2 emission rate, the plateau level is only ≈620 ppmv (which is only 58% of a doubling).
None of those numbers are worrisome.
In AR6 the IPCC used the term “counterfactual” rather than “implausible” for the SSP3-7.0 and SSP5-8.5 “baseline” scenarios.
Extract from section 1.6.1.4 of AR6 (page 1-110).
Note that the slide used in the video above starts around the “However, the likelihood of high emission scenarios such as …” phrase below.
Zeke Hausfather has been a notable critic of RCP8.5 since (at least ?) 2019, and he’s part of the original “Hockey Team” !
The overall picture on CO2 (/ GHG) emissions, and how they might “reasonably” be expected to evolve in the near-term (up to 2030), has changed significantly since AR5 was released 8 years ago (September 2013).
Even those that have supposedly increased at a global level, have either large parts of the earth missing, or many parts where it is only likely, so these events are local, not global.
Locally India has had an increase in rainfall. Scotland has, England and Wales havent. It is all local.
And in any case not a problem, and usually beneficial, such as in India.
I noted that IPCC’s reference start of Heatwave and Heavy Precipitaion trends is 1950. At least for Heatwaves, that allows them to ignore the 1930’s “Dust Bowl” years. 24 US states set their current high temperature records in the summers of 1930 to 1936. That does not include my state of Washington, whose current record was set in 1928, nor of Oregon, whose current record was set in 1898 (despite claims made of a Climate Change induced heatwave this year). About half of other state records were before the 1930’s including California.
He lost me on the first slide.
I used have respect for him.
Drought as defined by the IPCC, based on soil moisture, has become more common over the same period during which total global vegetation has increased, also according to the IPCC. The explanation is that their definition of drought ignores the effect of CO2 fertilization, which (among other things) reduces plant need for water. If soil moisture declines by ten percent and the need of plants for water declines by twenty percent, drought has increased by their definition, decreased by the definition actually relevant to us — the effect on vegetation.