How Climate Scenarios Lost Touch with Reality

The IPCC report made some really questionable assumptions, reached conclusions based on those, which were then exacerbated by the journalists treating the worst case scenarios as absolute certainties. Creating fear and panic around stuff usually works and has worked well for a long time.

It's true that we reduced the usage of coal in last few years. It's a big assumption that it happened because of a worst case scenario popularized by IPCC.

From this article[1], IPCC's 8.5 was based on the assumption that between 2017-2100 we will use 5x as much coal as we had done in our entire lifetime. That's a like a "coal boom". The world was already moving away from coal, even before the report, and at best the report and faulty scenario created more panic.

> Everyone knew about the decades of coal-powered economic growth in China, but those working closely on the future of energy had already grown somewhat skeptical that the same model would be deployed across the developing world — and even more skeptical that the rich nations of the world would ever return to coal in a sustained way.

> The most conspicuous example was an emissions pathway called RCP8.5, which required at least a fivefold growth of coal use over the course of the 21st century. Because it was the darkest available do-nothing path, RCP8.5 was reflexively called, in the scientific literature and by journalists covering it, “business as usual.”

Feedback loop as you call it probably slowed down the pace turning the whole thing into a culture war, creating mass hysteria, and getting people to fight each other when they were likely already moving away from coal. We don't have a control group in this case, and climate action is needed, though I am not sure if creating panic was justified at any time.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/10/26/magazine/clim...

I'm sorry, but the sports betting analogy is hilariously wrongheaded. In order to set any prices at all, books have reasonably good models for the sports they offer, including NFL. But these models are not and do not need to be perfect, in order for a profitable business model to exist. There are in fact, plenty of "sharps" who can beat the books on certain sports or certain types of markets (e.g. maybe you can model O/U markets very well, but money line not so much).

The book does not "stop taking bets" on the entire event in question. The book simply has to limit the "sharp" individually. Of course then we get into the whole cat and mouse game of chasing sharp action through straw bettors and playing games of information theory (i.e. how much money can a sharp win while still plausibly not outing themselves as an obvious sharp).

The book only would have a serious problem, if the entire world became sharp and every bettor was betting sharply. But alas there you have a paradox: anyone who is currently a sharp, has a strong self interest to preserve the secrecy of their models and methods, because knowing something that nobody else knows is precisely what creates their edge. And so therefore, as long as sharps have this self-interest, then there is no problem for books to keep operating, and the problem is reduced to one of identifying and limiting sharps occasionally (basically a "cost of doing business" that books acknowledge).

The only way for the scenario you describe to happen, is for disinterested actors with no thought of profit for themselves, to not only "solve" a particular market, but also release it to the entire world and make it a commodity. I'm not saying it's impossible, but I'm saying that normal economic incentives work against this outcome.

> How accurate can they possibly get with climate change modeling?

At least as accurate as weather reports, which can be pretty reliable days in advance. The outcome of a football match often can't be predicted accurately during the match. This should suggest that the atmosphere and a sport are qualitatively different things.

> What happens if they say the climate is fine?

They go into some other statistical modelling field, probably to do with meteorology, and we start to get accurate weather reports two weeks in advance.

It's not like high-level sports players, who have specialised into that sport, and are unlikely to ever be high-level players of any other sport. (If anything, there are incentives for high-level sports players to throw games to keep them more exciting! Maybe that's why we can't predict the games? It's not, but what if it were?)

We're probably using more carbon now, then in the 90s. You have to look at the total carbon output of the world.

Saying that RPC8.5 is based on wrong assumptions and then explaining that we should take IEA's scenario as a new basis seems weird. IEA is not exactly very good at predictions either...