Last week the Canadian Global Affairs Institute invited Dr. Roger Pielke Jr., author and professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, to speak at a dinner event at the Calgary Petroleum Club.
It was truly a remarkable experience to hear not only the results of his investigations and research but also to hear the story of his experiences in attempting to communicate his findings regarding the science of climate and weather events.
Dr. Pielke regularly talks about what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the U.S. National Climate Assessment say about extreme weather events and climate. His credentials on the topics are impressive. Dr. Pielke has been a professor at the University of Colorado since 2001 where he teaches and writes on a range of policy and governance issues related to science, technology, environment, and innovation. Before joining the University, he was a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. He has also served as a science and economics advisor to EnvironmentalProgress.org, and as a fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research and Environmental Sciences, the Breakthrough Institute, Oxford University Said School of Business and the Institute of Energy Economics, Japan. He has received global recognition for his work including an honorary doctorate from Linkoping University in Sweden and the Public Service Award for the Geological Society of America.
The story of his efforts to share his research findings with policy makers has some interesting complications. Ten years ago in July 2013, he testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works and testified again in December 2013 before the Subcommittee on Environment of the Committee on Science, Space and Technology of the Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives. His testimony was posted by an avid fan on YouTube and went viral and, in Pielke’s words, “that brought some attention to me”.
Since no good deed goes unpunished, despite Pielke’s well-researched testimony, an article by John Holdren, science advisor to President Obama, that was posted on the White House website led to a congressional investigation of Pielke. In the subsequent 2016 release of John Podesta’s emails by WikiLeaks, Pielke says it was revealed that a prominent American climate investor and liberal activist had been funding an eight-year campaign to delegitimize his research.
One might wonder what was the content of Pielke’s testimony that elicited such strong action and reaction?
In the December 2013 statement, Pielke summarized his talking points saying that there was a broad scientific consensus which was also supported and reported by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its fifth assessment report (2013) concluding that:
“There exists exceedingly little scientific support for claims found in the media and political debate that hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and drought have increased in frequency or intensity on climate timescales either in the United States or globally. Similarly, on climate timescales, it is incorrect to link the increasing costs of disasters with the emission of greenhouse gases.”
The assertions don’t seem all that inflammatory and Pielke followed up with his research and justifications. And Pielke openly asserts, as he did at the outset of his talk to the audience at the Petroleum Club, that:
“One thing I’d like to make clear is that climate change is real. It’s serious, and it deserves urgent attention to both mitigation and adaptation,” Pielke said. “But I’ve come to see, across my career, that the importance of climate change is held up by many people as a reason for why we can abandon scientific integrity. This talk is about climate and scientific integrity, how we maintain it, and how we use it in decision-making. Reasonable people can disagree about policies and different directions that we want to go, but none of us are going to benefit if we can’t take expertise and bring it to decision-making to ground policymaking in the best available knowledge. Overall, climate science and policy have a narrative problem.”
Pielke focused his discussion of the climate narrative problem on three areas of public discourse where scientific integrity has been compromised – hurricanes, disasters, and climate scenarios.
He addressed the inevitable question: Climate change is important – why focus on misinformation from the climate community?
Pielke answered that scientific integrity matters and we should be able to discuss and debate various climate policies. But there’s no negotiation over scientific integrity.
He added an interesting perspective on the rush to label “the other side” of climate public discourse. He sees the labels, the “calling of names” of “climate deniers” and “climate skeptics” as codewords for “I disagree with that person so I’m going to try to remove them from the field of public discourse”. He also pointed out that he is one of the few whose research is cited in all three working groups of the IPCC and should not be labelled as a contrarian or outside of the consensus.
In addressing the narrative problem, concerning the first area of public discourse- hurricanes, Pielke displayed a graph of official data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It displayed landfalling hurricanes in the U.S. and showed a long-term trend of no increase in hurricanes overall – despite environmental websites claiming the opposite. Pielke noted the reason for misreporting is the fact that there were no major hurricanes to hit the United States between 2005 to 2017, a pause reflected in the data chart which had a gap there from 2005 to 2017. So if you recently became climate aware in the last 20 years, which many in the media have, you would think that hurricanes were increasing.
“That’s why we do science – because our lived experience is not a good substitute for looking at data and evidence,” Pielke said. “So if you’re paying attention to the news, just this week, it was all over the news that the proportion of hurricanes that have become major hurricanes has increased. Well, not according to the science. So, one of the challenges that I try to emphasize is that there is good information out there. If the media ignores it and in the political debates it’s ignored, then it’s all of our responsibility to ferret out what’s real.”
In addressing his second subject, disasters, Pielke differentiated disasters from extreme weather defining a disaster as an extreme weather event that intersects with an exposed and vulnerable society.
He quoted from an October 21, 2023 Financial Times article that at a private event last month, one executive at Lloyd’s of London that oversees the market told underwriters that they had not yet seen clear evidence that a warming climate is a major driver in loss claims. Pielke attended the event in person and perceived a concern in the room that anyone making that statement publicly would be called a climate denier, leading to a suppression or minimization of the statement.
Pielke also addressed UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ claim that the number of weather, climate and water-related disasters has increased by a factor of five over the past 50 years. He noted that Guterres used data from the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) to make this claim. Pielke referred to notes in CRED reports that have advised for decades “Don’t look at our data and use it to say anything about the weather” and advises their data shows the evolution of registration of natural disaster events over time, which has increased with better means of communication. As well, since there is more international aid for disaster affected communities, more communities are reporting.
On the subject of U.S. disasters, in his sixteen years of affiliation with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Pielke observed a reporting phenomenon – an addiction to reporting billion-dollar weather disasters. The reports are used by advocacy groups, and then the media, who publicize that climate change is causing more billion-dollar weather disasters, something Pielke says isn’t supported by science. He points out that as the United States has gotten wealthier, the actual proportion of that wealth that is damaged in disasters has gone down dramatically.
Pielke then addressed his third subject, climate scenarios and the effect of misinterpretation.
He referred to the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES) – a report by the IPCC that was published in 2000. The 1,184 greenhouse gas emissions scenarios described in the Report have been used to make projections of possible future climate change. Pielke noted that the area of discussion of climate scenarios “is so full of jargon and technical details, that it is almost impenetrable”. Since 1,184 scenarios weren’t easy to study, the community decided to simply to study the four you see represented by the four bold blue lines on the first graph below- namely RCP8.5, RCP 6.0, RCP4.5 and RCP2.6.
(RCP 4.5 is described by the IPCC as a moderate scenario in which emissions peak around 2040 and then decline. RCP 8.5 is the highest baseline emissions scenario in which emissions continue to rise throughout the twenty-first century. Climate change projected under RCP 8.5 will typically be more severe. RCP 2.6 at the bottom is what today we would call the Paris Accord target)
Pielke pointed out that the assumption underlying all the SRES scenarios is that the world is going to turn to coal as the dominant energy source in the 21st century. For this to happen, Pielke calculates that over 3000 new coal plants would have to be built by the year 2100, which he says won’t happen and the IEA expectation is in agreement. However, the Canadian government, the U.S. government, and the Indian government, all rely on the RCP 8.5 scenario and it is pervasive in global climate policy as the IPCC remains focused on it. Pielke points out that all the SRES scenarios have assumptions about GDP, the carbon intensity of energy, and more that are already out of date. Pielke also pointed out that the scientific community has increasingly relied on RCP 8.5 – the most extreme scenario and in 2023, the RCP 8.5 remains the most used scenario in research with many studies published each day using it.
“So why is that?” Pielke said. “The reason is, if you do a study with RCP 8.5 with massive amounts of emissions to 2100, you’re going to get big effects. You can publish that in a prominent journal. Your university will put out a press release on it. You might even get into the New York Times because these very extreme scenarios are notable. Scientists agree there are legitimate reasons for using extreme scenarios in research. Usually, it’s what we call exploratory research, not projective research. Scientists tell me ‘Well if we want to separate the signal of forced climate change from the noise of internal climate variability, we need these strong scenarios’.”
Pielke referred to this attitude as “noble cause corruption”- the idea that less rigorous science and even bad science is excusable if it advances a cause.
A revision of the scenario projections was initiated in June 2023 and the process of generating the next generation of scenarios has begun and Pielke reports they have removed the top RCP8.5 and RCP 6.0 scenarios. However, he says because we are currently using scenarios developed in the early 2000s, leading media and advocacy narratives which use them extensively are problematic “because a lot of bad science has gotten mixed in with the good science and it’s really hard to tell the difference.”
“Our discussions of climate policy are going to have to move away from ‘apocalyptic’ climate model projections to a much broader base of reasons why we might want to decarbonize faster- energy security, energy economics and energy access among those. I think is going to be a healthy transition. I think it is going to be a hard one for the scientific community and we need to uphold and reward scientific integrity.”
Dr. Roger Pielke’s most recent book is titled “The Rightful Place of Science: Disasters & Climate Change” Many thanks to the Canadian Global Affairs Institute for inviting Dr Pielke to deliver his talk.
Maureen McCall is an energy professional who writes on issues affecting the energy industry