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How Climate Scenarios Lost Touch with Reality

issues.org

31–40 of 85 posts

Re: How Climate Scenarios Lost Touch with Reality

#31
Eeh. Misguided article. The article itself starts by recognizing the challenge of making scenarios because of the feedback loop they embody. Then seemingly forgets about all that and basically says "coal has likely peaked already, why are assuming it will grow in the future?"

Well, because of that feedback loop. Coal is still a cheap way of making energy, as it is in the business-as-usual economics of the scenarios. If we say "coal is not a problem", the pressure shifts away from coal and its usage may linger longer than it should.

The scenarios are about the forces impacting the trends, not the trends themselves.

Re: How Climate Scenarios Lost Touch with Reality

#32
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m going to imagine you mean ‘pawn’ instead of tool here. Otherwise it feels pretty harsh for a young girl who just cares about earth.

> a young girl who just cares about earth I imagine there are several 100M of those on the planet. Most do not get to address the UN, nor have well-off parents who are using her to get publicity that they couldn't get for their own views. https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/10059484/greta-thunberg-parent...

> Most do not get to address the UN

So the argument here is that there are tens of millions of children who are worried not about video games, TikTok, school etc but about how they are being denied the ability to speak at the UN ?

And her parents appear to be upper middle-class given their careers have been limited in success.

Re: How Climate Scenarios Lost Touch with Reality

#33
post #3

Despite the provocative title this seems well-intentioned. The scientific accuracy needs to be top-priority, these particular elements of the projections should be assessed and reevaluated if necessary.

Agreed, but organizations the the IPCC are famous for the level of caution and caveats on their predictions. It would be irresponsible for them to use provocative/apocalyptic predictions. But it seems equally irresponsible to use provocative titles on well-intentioned articles, given the extremely obvious likelihood that climate denialists will exploit the hyperbolic title to misrepresent the content and arguments of the paper.

Re: How Climate Scenarios Lost Touch with Reality

#34
post #27

I'm not clear on the take away. Are the models wrong? Or is it more that the projections were off? Put differently, are the models precise but inaccurate or both? If inaccurate only, are they still instructive?

The article argues that the models are still using baselines from the 90s, while the world as it is today has already made significant progress toward decarbonizing industry. Therefore the projection are far more onerous than they should be.

Re: How Climate Scenarios Lost Touch with Reality

#35
How accurate are models of complex systems?

Consider that if highly accurate models were really possible someone could make one that would accurately predict NFL game outcomes. When that happens we will know it because Sports Books would no longer take bets on NFL games. Sports Books profit because they get a slight statistical advantage which pays off due to bettor volume.

So we know they can't make an accurately predicting model for football. How accurate can they possibly get with climate change modeling? It's orders of magnitude more difficult. Football is formally rule bounded and tons of data on a long history of games is readily available. In contrast, the vast majority of climate data is based on theoretical methods. This isn't bad, it's just far less precise because the variance of all those theory based estimators accumulates across the model, widening the confidence interval of its outputs to a point where it may not be useful.

Finally, climate scientists are people. They have careers, families, financial responsibilities. What happens if they say the climate is fine? Some other crisis gets the funding and their careers are destroyed. They can't just switch to a different science, they've invested a lot of time and money becoming a specific thing.

I found this article very wordy and skimmed parts, but it looks to me like a goalpost moving exercise to explain why their aggressive predictions for the present time didn't come true.

Re: How Climate Scenarios Lost Touch with Reality

#37
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is waaaaaaaaay too many words… I agree, so I used ChatGPT to summarize this for us: In the article "Climate Change Scenarios Have Lost Touch with Reality," written by Roger Pielke Jr. and Justin Ritchie and published in Issues in Science and Technology, the authors argue that the climate change scenarios used by policymakers and scientists have become disconnected from empirical reality. They suggest that this…

Please don't. Anyone on HN who wants a ChatGPT summary can make one themselves; when I read a person's post I want to know what that person has to say about a topic, not what they can produce with a machine. It's the same reason we don't need comments along the lines of 'I used a spell checker to identify the typos in your comment' or consisting of tables generated in MS Excel. edit: it's not due to any antipathy to…

Still upset about Wikipedia too?

Re: How Climate Scenarios Lost Touch with Reality

#38
post #3

Despite the provocative title this seems well-intentioned. The scientific accuracy needs to be top-priority, these particular elements of the projections should be assessed and reevaluated if necessary.

[flagged]

Perhaps a reply to the wrong comment?

In what way were average people mentioned? Who are the villains? Who's going after them?

Re: How Climate Scenarios Lost Touch with Reality

#39

This is waaaaaaaaay too many words when all they want to say is “RCP8.5 is now unrealistic given progress towards climate goals, and the “business as usual” scenario should be updated in the next IPCC report”

I get the sense that they are trying very carefully not to sound like climate change denialists, so that they won't get conflated with people much further from the scientific consensus. If they just said "the IPCC models are BS," they would likely be dismissed out of hand, at least in the scientific community.

Pielke Jr is a climate-action "denialist" from a long way back, no? (claims to accept the science but then concludes there's nothing we can do about it for the foreseeable future other than adapt. This article seems to be saying "well ok some of the changes we've made are making a difference to emissions, but now there's no real need to make any more...").
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