Search Results for “pielke”

Roger Pielke Jr. on Chris Wright: Energy Realism & Climate Pragmatism at the Dept of Energy – ‘Wright pulls no punches when characterizing the state of public discussion of climate change, & he is not wrong’

November 21, 2024

https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/energy-realism-and-climate-pragmatism By Roger Pielke Jr. Excerpt: He’s a climate denier! That is the standard reaction of many in the climate lobby when encountering views on climate and energy deviating from the monomaniacal view that climate is the world’s single-most important issue. Reactions from climate advocates to the nomination of Chris Wright,1 CEO of Liberty Energy, to serve in Donald Trump’s cabinet as Secretary of Energy have followed this tired and lazy pattern. Here are some examples: Rep. Sean Casten (D-IL): “Chris Wright is a climate denier who prioritizes the wants of energy producers over the needs of American consumers.” Sierra Club: “Chris Wright is a climate denier who has profited off of polluting our communities and endangering our health and future.” The Washington Post: “Climate crisis skeptic is Trump’s top energy pick”2 What even is a “climate crisis skeptic”? The irony here is that Wright’s views on energy and climate, which he has expressed often and in detail, are largely consistent with the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The views of his critics? Not so much. Let’s take a look at what Wright has said about climate change in a recent 180-page report called Bettering Human Lives. Wright acknowledges two fundamental realities — climate change is real and fossil fuels have enormous benefits: The expansion of the global energy supply by adding fossil fuels has greatly improved the human condition; it also brought the risk of climate change caused by increased atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Wright’s plain vanilla views on climate change are consistent with the most recent IPCC assessment: Human industrial and agricultural activity increases greenhouse gas concentrations and is contributing significantly to a warming trend that earth has experienced over the past 150 years. Total warming over this period has been about 1.3°C (2.3°F). Wright pulls no punches when characterizing the state of public discussion of climate change, and he is not wrong: Climate change discourse is unfortunately rife with false claims and alarmist proclamations from all quarters. Wright cites the IPCC on extreme weather, which — as THB readers know well — expresses findings that contradict many claims made in support of climate activism: [R]eports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) actually show no increase in the frequency or intensity of hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, or weather-related droughts. Wright supports pragmatic climate policies that reduce emissions: Two things are required for positive progress on climate change: a sober understanding of the issue and the tradeoffs required, and massive improvements in energy technologies that can deliver low-carbon energy that is also low cost, reliable and secure. Wright clearly differs from many climate activists in his view that while climate change poses real risks, it is one of many problems facing humanity, and not a crisis or existential threat: Climate change is a real and global challenge that we should and can address. However, representing it as the most urgent threat to humanity today displaces concerns about more pressing threats of malnutrition, access to clean water, air pollution, endemic diseases, and human rights, among others. As an energy executive, Wright has a deep understanding of the global energy economy, and he calls for “energy sobriety”: Politicians, policymakers, pundits, and the press talk endlessly about how solar, wind, and batteries can transform our whole energy system and address the climate crisis. The reality is that these politically favored technologies have not, will not, and cannot replace most of the energy services and raw materials provided by hydrocarbons. Today they are deployed almost exclusively in the electricity sector, which delivers only 20% of total primary energy consumption. Manufacturing is the largest user of energy globally, mostly in the form of process heat that cannot effectively be supplied via electricity. Further, the ultra-high-power density required for the likes of aviation, global shipping, long-haul trucking, and mobile mining equipment have no viable replacements in sight. Critical materials from hydrocarbons provide nitrogen fertilizer that is responsible for fully half of global food production. In addition, hydrocarbons supply critical materials to produce plastics and petrochemicals that are essential components of modern lives. They also provide asphalt, paints, lubricants, cosmetics, 60% of global clothing fiber, and thousands of other products. Without hydrocarbons we would have no way to produce the vast quantities of steel and cement that undergird our built world. Even wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries are made of hydrocarbon materials and require huge amounts of energy from hydrocarbons to supply the high-temperature process heat required for their fabrication. Energy sobriety is desperately needed. …

Extreme Weather Expert Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. on ‘extreme weather event attribution’ – It’s ‘research performed explicitly to serve legal & political ends…promoted via press release’

October 7, 2024

https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/weather-attribution-alchemy By Roger Pielke Jr. Weather Attribution Alchemy: A new THB series takes a close look at extreme weather event attribution, Part 1 Excerpt: In the aftermath of many high profile extreme weather events we see headlines like the following: Climate change made US and Mexico heatwave 35 times more likely — BBC Study Finds Climate Change Doubled Likelihood of Recent European Floods — NYT Severe Amazon Drought was Made 30 Times More Likely by Climate Change — Bloomberg For those who closely follow climate science and the assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), such headlines can be difficult to make sense of because neither the IPCC nor the underlying scientific literature comes anywhere close to making such strong and certain claims of attribution. How then might we understand such high profile claims? … Weather event attribution does not appear in the IPCC Glossary, however it does appear in the body of the AR6 report, where the IPCC explains that event attribution research seeks to “to attribute aspects of specific extreme weather and climate events to certain causes.” The IPCC continues: “Scientists cannot answer directly whether a particular event was caused by climate change,1 as extremes do occur naturally, and any specific weather and climate event is the result of a complex mix of human and natural factors. Instead, scientists quantify the relative importance of human and natural influences on the magnitude and/or probability of specific extreme weather events.” With this post I want to introduce three starting points for our discussions which will unfold over a series of posts in coming weeks and months. First, event attribution research is a form tactical science — research performed explicitly to serve legal and political ends. This is not my opinion, but has been openly stated on many occasions by the researchers who developed and perform event attribution research.2 Such research is not always subjected to peer review, and this is often by design as peer-review takes much longer than the news cycle. Instead, event attribution studies are generally promoted via press release. For instance, researchers behind the World Weather Attribution (WWA) initiative explain that one of their key motives in conducting such studies is, “increasing the ‘immediacy’ of climate change, thereby increasing support for mitigation.” WWA’s chief scientist, Friederike Otto, explains, “Unlike every other branch of climate science or science in general, event attribution was actually originally suggested with the courts in mind.” Another oft-quoted scientist who performs rapid attribution analyses, Michael Wehner, summarized their importance (emphasis in original) — “The most important message from this (and previous) analyses is that “Dangerous climate change is here now!” … Weather event attribution methodologies have been developed not just to feed media narratives or support general climate advocacy. Otto and others have been very forthright that the main function of such studies is to create a defensible scientific basis in support of lawsuits against fossil fuel companies — She explains the strategy in detail in this interview, From Extreme Event Attribution to Climate Litigation. As I recently argued, tactical science is not necessarily bad science, but it should elevate the degree of scrutiny that such analyses face, especially when they generally are not subjected to independent peer review. In this series I’ll apply some scrutiny and invite you to participate as we go along. Second, extreme event attribution was developed as a response to the failure of the IPCC’s conventional approach to detection and attribution (D&A) to reach high confidence in the detection of increasing trends in the frequency or intensity of most types of impactful extreme events — notably hurricanes, floods, drought, and tornadoes. … The underlying theory of change here appears to be that people must be fearful of climate change and thus need come to understand that it threatens their lives, not in the future, but today and tomorrow. If they don’t have that fear, the argument goes, then they will discount the threat and fail to support the right climate policies. Hence, from this perspective, the IPCC”s failure to reach strong claims of detection and attribution represents a political problem — a problem that can be rectified via the invention of extreme event attribution.

Roger Pielke Jr. details ‘The Top Five Climate Science Scandals’: Study claiming no ‘climate crisis’ retracted ‘for not for being wrong…but instead for expressing views that are politically unhelpful’

August 13, 2024

https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/the-top-five-climate-science-scandals Excerpt: By Roger Pielke Jr.: I define a scandal as a situation of objectively flawed science — in substance and/or procedure — that the community has been unable to make right, but should. … The Alimonti Retraction for an Unpopular View The science community has shown a willingness to retract a climate science paper — in this case not for being wrong in any substantive way, but instead for expressing views that are politically unhelpful. In 2022, a group of Italian scientists published a paper that summarized the IPCC’s conclusions on extreme weather trends, consistent with what you’ve been reading here at THB. The paper broke no new ground but was a useful review to have in the literature. Even so, several activist journalists and scientists demanded that it be retracted — and, remarkably, the Springer Nature journal that published the paper obliged. I heard from a whistleblower who shared all of the sordid details, where you can read about here and here. … The Interns Made a “Dataset” and We Used it for Research I have recently documented how the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) — supposedly one of the top science journals — published a paper using a “dataset” cobbled together by some interns for marketing a now-defunct insurance company. There is actually no such dataset out in the real world — it is a fiction. The paper is the only normalization study purporting to identify a signal of human-caused climate change in disaster losses and thus has been highlighted by both the IPCC and U.S. National Climate Assessment. That context makes its correction or retraction politically problematic. When I informed PNAS about the fake dataset they refused to look at it and stood behind the paper. Read about the backstory and how PNAS stonewalled any reconsideration. … A Love Affair with Extreme Emissions Scenarios It is not just RCP8.5. We love fantastical coal futures in all scenarios. Source: Ritchie and Dowlatabadi 2017. The top of the table won’t be a surprise to longtime readers of THB. Extreme emissions scenarios that map out implausible and even apocalyptic futures are a favorite in climate research and assessment. This space continues to be dominated by a scenario called RCP8.5 — which has coal consumption increasing more than 10x by 2100 (see figure above and all credit to my colleague Justin Ritchie). However, as the community comes to accept the ridiculousness of RCP8.5, efforts are being made to replace it with another extreme scenario — Right now that appears to be SSP3-7.0 which also foresees a massive increase in coal (~6x) and a world of about 13 billion people in 2100, far more than projected by the United Nations. … A Major Error in the IPCC This accurate finding became its inaccurate opposite by the time it reached the IPCC Synthesis Report. The IPCC is a massive effort, and if it did not exist we’d have to invent it. It is not surprising that a few mistakes can creep into the assessment. What matters is what happens when mistakes are made. I identified a major error in the IPCC AR6 Synthesis Report involving confusion over hurricane intensities — It was a simple error having to do with technical terminology that was misunderstood (hurricane fixes, i.e., measurements — became reinterpreted as hurricanes). For the complete list of the top 5, see Dr. Pielke Jr.’s full article at: https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/the-top-five-climate-science-scandals

Roger Pielke Jr.: What the media won’t tell you about … Wildfires – Even the UN ‘IPCC has not detected or attributed fire occurrence or area burned to human-caused climate change’

June 25, 2024

https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/what-the-media-wont-tell-you-about-783 What the media won’t tell you about … Wildfires What the IPCC really says, trend data and the complexities of adaptation By ROGER PIELKE JR. Excerpt: Wildfire, common to many healthy ecosystems, is a particularly challenging problem for society because of its impacts on property and health. It is also challenging because people like to locate themselves in fire-prone places and do things that ignite fires. We have learned through hard experience that complete suppression of wildfire is not the best policy — despite what Smokey Bear says — as it can actually lead to even greater and more harmful wildfire events. These dynamics together make wildfire a challenging issue for policy. This week, wildfire smoke from fires in Canada have drifted south along the eastern seaboard of the United States, affecting New York City and Washington, DC, and correspondingly capturing a lot of media attention. The event should offer a teachable moment on the complexities of climate and the challenges of adapting to a volatile world. With this post I discuss some of the aspects of wildfires that I see as missing in the public discussion. I start with what the Intergovernmental panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says about wildfire, discuss readily available data on wildfire trends and conclude with the complexities of policy in the face of interconnected human-environment dynamics. The IPCC has not detected or attributed fire occurrence or area burned to human-caused climate change The IPCC is of course not infallible, but it is essential and always a good first place to start when discussing what is known about extreme events and their impacts. Many people are surprised when they learn that the IPCC does not evaluate trends in or causes of wildfires. Instead, the IPCC focuses on “fire weather” which it defines as (emphasis in original): “Weather conditions conducive to triggering and sustaining wildfires, usually based on a set of indicators and combinations of indicators including temperature, soil moisture, humidity and wind. Fire weather does not include the presence or absence of fuel load. Note: distinct from wildfire occurrence and area burned.” … Globally, emissions from wildfires has decreased globally over recent decades, as well as in many regions Source: Copernicus.eu The figure above shows that wildfire emissions have declined globally since 2003, based on data from the EU. That doesn’t mean that wildfires have decreased everywhere. For instance, wildfires have increased over recent decades in the Western United States, France and Russia. It does mean that claims that wildfire has increased globally in recent decades do not have empirical support, at least by this important and widely accepted metric. Canada — the focus of extensive fire activity this week polluting the air in the eastern U.S. and elsewhere — has not seen an increase in fire activity in recent decades, as you can see in the figure below, showing official data. Forest fires in Canada. Source: NFDP In Quebec specifically, there is also no indication of a long-term increase in fire activity, as you can see below. In fact, recent years have been unusually quiet. Forest fires in Quebec. Source: NFDP Looking at data from the NFDP, we can see that the majority of fires in Quebec and the area that they burn over the past decade are caused by humans, with the balance caused by lightning, as shown in the figure below. Over the much longer term, going back to 1700, research indicates that recent “burn rates” across Canada in recent decades have been much lower than in centuries past, as you can see in the figure below. Source: Chavardès et al. 2022

Roger Pielke Jr.: ‘How Democrats Left the UN IPCC Behind – ‘Democrats — not all, but many — have left the IPCC behind in favor of an extreme view of climate and extreme events’

May 24, 2024

https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/how-democrats-left-the-ipcc-behind?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=119454&post_id=144801990&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1g0x4t&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email Partisan realignment on the science of climate change By ROGER PIELKE JR. On Wednesday, I’ll be testifying before the Senate Committee on the Budget in a hearing titled, “Droughts, Dollars, and Decisions: Water Scarcity in a Changing Climate.” My testimony is embargoed until then, but after the hearing, I will post my oral and written testimony here and I will be happy to engage questions and comments. I have been invited by the minority (Republicans) and asked to summarize for the committee the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on drought. The first time I testified before the Senate, in 2002, I was invited by Democrats and I was similarly asked to summarize the findings of the IPCC on extreme events. That has me thinking about how the views of the IPCC, Democrats, and Republicans1 (and my own views as well) may have changed over the past several decades on the science of climate change — and on extreme weather and climate events specifically. As I will relate in my testimony on Wednesday, the IPCC (Working Group 1) has been remarkably consistent in its periodic assessment reports in its findings on the detection and attribution of trends in extreme events. My research with many colleagues over decades has often been cited in those assessments, and — looking back at my past peer-reviewed studies, commentaries, and testimonies — my views have developed over time but also stayed highly consistent and also consistent with the findings of the IPCC. Thus, the fact that Democrats used to invite me to testify about the IPCC and now Republicans do cannot be explained by a change in the findings of the IPCC or a rethinking of my own perspectives. Instead, it’s my observation and experience that the views of the political parties on the assessments of the IPCC has shifted dramatically over the past several decades.2 The schematic below shows my impression of how things looked in 2002, when I first testified before Congress. At that time, Democrats, for the most part, had views on climate change and extreme events largely in line with the findings of the IPCC. I’d venture that this is why I was invited by Democrats at the time to testify.3 Flash forward to 2024. Much more research has been published and three further IPCC assessments have been produced. Over this time, the IPCC’s bottom-line findings on climate and extreme events have become better supported with evidence and research. In 2024, here is how I see views of the assessments of the IPCC in the current U.S. Congress. Democrats — not all, but many — have left the IPCC behind in favor of an extreme view of climate and extreme events. Republicans — not all, but many — find themselves much more in line with the findings of the IPCC on climate and extreme events. Similarly, I’d guess that explains why in recent years I’ve been invited to testify by Republicans.4 Of course, consistency with the IPCC (or not) says little about policy preferences. Democrats remain the party championing action on climate policy and Republicans remain much less supportive. Of course, the key question here is, What action? I have long argued that there are unexplored opportunities for greater bipartisan support for pragmatic energy and adaptation policies that would accelerate decarbonization and reduce vulnerabilities — but that’s a topic for another day.

Roger Pielke Jr.: The Politics and Policy of a National Climate Emergency Declaration

April 21, 2024

The Politics and Policy of a National Climate Emergency Declaration By Roger Pielke Jr. “A significant feature of American government during the last fifteen years is the expansion of governmental activity on the basis of emergency.” That is the opening line in a 1949 academic paper on “Emergencies and the Presidency.” The role of the president in declaring a state of emergency to achieve policy goals has been a policy issue that dates back at least to President Abraham Lincoln. Today, President Biden is once again being called upon by his supporters to declare a national emergency on climate change. Rather than argue for or against it, in this post I’m going to explain the history of such declarations, what recent experience says about their effectiveness in policy, and suggest the three questions we should be asking instead. A national emergency declaration may be a political end, but it is also supposed to be a policy means — a mechanism intended to achieve certain outcomes in the national interest. Apart from the politics of using an emergency declaration to signal affinity with certain political interests, below I recommend the policy questions that we should be asking instead. In 1866, in the case of Ex parte Milligan, the Supreme Court argued that the Constitution allowed sufficient room for the government to deal with existential threats, and that the invocation of additional authority by the president beyond that already granted by the Constitution was unnecessary and a bad idea: “The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times and under all circumstances. No doctrine involving more pernicious consequences was ever invented by the wit of man than that any of its provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government. Such a doctrine leads directly to anarchy or despotism, but the theory of necessity on which it is based is false, for the government, within the Constitution, has all the powers granted to it which are necessary to preserve its existence” Even so, in the century that followed this ruling the invocation of emergency powers by the president expanded dramatically, especially under the administration of Franklin Roosevelt and then during and after World War 2. In the 1970s, Congress viewed the presidential assertions of emergency and the corresponding expansion of presidential powers to be problematic from the standpoint of the balance of powers between branches of government. The Senate observed in a 1973 report that the country was then under four declared emergencies that were being used to implement 470 different administrative statutes.1 The Senate expressed concern that these emergencies justified a wide range of extraordinary and problematic presidential authority: Under the powers delegated by these statutes, the President may: seize property; organize and control the means of production; seize commodities; assign military forces abroad; institute martial law; seize and control all transportation and communication; regulate the operation of private enterprise; restrict travel; and, in a plethora of particular ways, control the lives of all American citizens. Congress sought to limit these seeming unchecked executive powers via the National Emergencies Act of 1976 which was signed into law by President Gerald Ford. The legislation established more formal legal guidelines for the use of emergency powers by the president and created a mechanism for Congress to force the end of a particular declaration, in an effort to rein in the expansion of executive authority. Since that time the U.S. president has declared 69 emergencies, and since the Clinton Administration the practice has become fairly common, as you can see in the table below from the Congressional Research Service. Currently, the U.S. has 42 active national emergencies in effect, the oldest dating to the Carter Administration and the Iran hostage crisis. Emergency declarations continue remain in effect that were declared by all presidents since Carter except Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, meaning that if a current president declares a national emergency, then it is likely to be around for a while. Since President Carter, Democratic presidents have declared 37 national emergencies and Republican presidents declared 32. The Clinton Administration declared the highest number of emergencies, with 15, but the GW Bush, Trump, and Biden Administrations issued more per year in office. To date, President Biden has declared eight national emergencies.

Pielke Jr.: The Weaponization of ‘Scientific Consensus’ – Only science offers a path to truth, not surveys of expert opinion

February 6, 2024

https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/the-weaponization-of-scientific-consensus By ROGER PIELKE JR. Excerpt: In September, 2022 California Governor Gavin Newsome signed into law a bill that prohibited medical professionals from sharing “misinformation” with patients. Specifically, the law stated that it would be [U]nprofessional conduct for a physician and surgeon to disseminate misinformation or disinformation related to COVID-19. The law defined “misinformation”: “Misinformation” means false information that is contradicted by contemporary scientific consensus contrary to the standard of care. The law reflected a common perspective: A scientific consensus represents truth and views outside that consensus are misinformation. Thus, to identify those who are spreading misinformation we simply need to identify the relevant scientific consensus. Those out of step with the consensus, the argument continues, can then be called out or sanctioned for spreading misinformation — and public discourse can proceed based on accepted facts, not falsehoods. The notion of consensus-as-truth has been operationalized in various forms: journalistic “fact checkers,” academic “misinformation” researchers, and content moderation on social media platforms. The practical effect is the creation of self-appointed arbiters of truth — journalists, academics, social media platforms, and even governments — who render judgments on acceptable and unacceptable speech according to conformance with an acceptable view. There are many problems with the notion of consensus-as-truth and the (self)appointment of misinformation police to regulate discourse, whether of the public or, as in the case of the California law, of experts themselves. A scientific consensus is not a single view, but a distribution of views. Almost 20 years ago I participated in an exchange in Science with Naomi Oreskes on this point. Professor Oreskes shot to fame by publishing a commentary that argued that the consensus on climate change was universal, based on a review of 928 papers. Oreskes argument quickly moved from characterizing science to a call for political action, based on the asserted universal consensus. I responded by arguing that a consensus is not a single thing, but a distribution, and policy should be robust to that distribution: The actions that we take on climate change should be robust to (i) the diversity of scientific perspectives, and thus also to (ii) the diversity of perspectives of the nature of the consensus. A consensus is a measure of a central tendency and, as such, it necessarily has a distribution of perspectives around that central measure. On climate change, almost all of this distribution is well within the bounds of legitimate scientific debate and reflected within the full text of the IPCC reports. Our policies should not be optimized to reflect a single measure of the central tendency or, worse yet, caricatures of that measure, but instead they should be robust enough to accommodate the distribution of perspectives around that central measure, thus providing a buffer against the possibility that we might learn more in the future. A further complication is that the notion of a “consensus on climate change” is incoherent. In a 2011 study of how the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) represented uncertainty in its Fourth Assessment Report, Rachael Jonasson and I identified 2,744 “findings” across the AR4 report — each finding was a specific scientific claim. There was a degree of consensus associated with each of those claims — the distribution of views may have been narrow (e.g., climate change is real), bimodal or wide (e.g., future hurricane incidence), and with the advantage of hindsight, utterly wrong (e.g., a high emissions scenario is business-as-usual). … Full report: https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/the-weaponization-of-scientific-consensus

Dr. Roger Pielke’s Deposition in Mann v. Steyn case

January 19, 2024

Mann V. Steyn Goes to Trial After 12 Years On X, Roger Pielke Jr talks about his deposition in the cast. Pielke Deposition in Mann vs. CEI/National Review In the interests of transparency, and to provide a window to some of the ugliness found in climate science, you can find a PDF of my deposition in this casehttps://t.co/20nU4CObnh — The Honest Broker (@RogerPielkeJr) January 17, 2024

ROGER PIELKE JR.: ‘Saving the planet, one COP (UN climate summit) at a time’ – Next stop Dubai! – ‘Climate is now a full-scale industry, with fortunes & careers to be made’

November 26, 2023

Pielke Jr.: “Global Climate Policy Hasn’t Made Much Difference on Energy Transitions” … “COP28 is expecting 70,000 participants, more than double those of COP27. Climate is now a full-scale industry, with fortunes and careers to be made, and perhaps lost.”

Pielke Jr.: “This week the 28th Conference of Parties (COP28) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change kicks off in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Accompanying the conference will be an onslaught of climate news, information, reporting, propaganda, misinformation, marketing, spin, science and the science-like… Along with the climate industrial complex comes massive vested interests, ranging from the financial to the professional to the political.”

Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. slams Biden climate report: It ‘pours fuel on the pathological politicization of climate science’ – ‘More a glossy promotional brochure’ than ‘a careful assessment of the scientific literature’

November 16, 2023

https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/original-sin Original Sin: The U.S. National Climate Assessment was Off Track from the Start By ROGER PIELKE JR. Excerpt: Over the past few days I have commented on X/Twitter about the just-released Fifth U.S. National Climate Assessment (NCA). It is much more a glossy promotional brochure than anything resembling a careful assessment of the scientific literature on climate change and the United States. That’s a shame because scientific assessments are crucially important. Instead, the U.S. NCA pours fuel on the pathological politicization of climate science. Among the issues I have highlighted: Several reviewers asked the NCA to cite our various papers on extreme weather and U.S. losses. The NCA refused, in one instance claiming “this comment is inconsistent with the author team’s thorough assessment of the science” and in another, falsely claiming, “Pielke et al. only examined trends through 2005 and have not published an updated assessment since.” Someone should tell them about Google Scholar, where our most recent work is easy to find. The report’s main chapter on climate trends was led by a scientist who works for Project Drawdown, a climate advocacy group. That chapter was also written by a scientist at The Nature Conservancy and the company Stripe, which makes money via carbon offsetting through carbon removal. There is no need for these conflicts of interest to play such a prominent role in the report’s authorship, but they perhaps explain some of its errors.1 The report leads with the “billion dollar disaster” meme popularized by NOAA. As Nature summarized the report: “Extreme weather events caused by global warming cost the country around US$150 billion in direct damages each year, says the climate report.” All U.S. extreme weather and its economic impacts can now apparently be attributed to global warming. I could go on. See my X/Twitter feed for more. … The failures of the NCA stem in part from its placement inside the White House, making it a tempting target for political meddling. But a deeper reason for its failures result from a belief that science can make politics lead to desired policy. Unfortunately, that belief brings politics more into science and science assessments than anything else. Here are two papers that explain how that happened: Pielke Jr, R. A. (2000). Policy history of the US global change research program: Part I. Administrative development. Global Environmental Change, 10(1), 9-25. Pielke Jr, R. A. (2000). Policy history of the US global change research program: Part II. Legislative process. Global environmental change, 10(2), 133-144.

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