2021 made for a big year in climate politicking around the globe, from the newest United Nations climate change report to the COP26 conference in Glasgow and interspersing extreme weather events.
The United States was no exception. President Joe Biden and Democratic lawmakers spent much of the year building and pitching their energy and climate agenda, pointing to wildfires and devastating storms to argue for their green policies to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
“I know these disasters aren’t going to stop,” Biden said during a speech following Hurricane Ida, pitching his Build Back Better legislation. “They’re only going to come with more frequency and ferocity.”
It’s those kinds of broad assertions that Roger Pielke Jr., a professor in environmental studies at the University of Colorado in Boulder, said deserve a closer look if public officials are going to stay true to historical data and to craft informed policy.
Pielke has built a career in scrutinizing data sets and laying them against public policies or proposed policies to determine whether the data justify their underlying premises.
That includes published writing and public talks warning against blanket attribution of extreme weather to man-made climate change, as well as discouraging a notion of “the science” being clear on climate in the way it’s often presented to be as conclusively supporting a given public policy.
“There’s no such thing as ‘the science’ on any topic. There’s a lot of research that’s out there, but taking knowledge and converting it into policy-relevant information — it’s not so simple as saying, ‘Oh, there’s this one lump out there called science, and it tells us one thing,'” Pielke told the Washington Examiner.
“For example, you could say extreme weather events are increasing, and that’s true and false. Heatwaves are for sure increasing. Hurricanes are not. Tornadoes are not,” Pielke said. “You have to go at some point from ‘the science’ to a more precise characterization of what you’re talking about.”
Pielke brought up the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s recent report that concluded it is “unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean, and land.”
But the report doesn’t support what he described as “apocalyptic views” about where the world is headed or fully justify the assessment Biden offered.
“The IPCC has been pretty consistent really since the start that they can’t detect a frequency trend in hurricanes in the North Atlantic,” he said.
To be certain, Pielke didn’t waffle about climate change and mankind’s contribution to it.
“Climate change is real. It poses great risks for the future,” he said. Still, he is wary of public officials and others overstating the likelihood of the worst climate scenarios or misstating altogether where the IPCC consensus lies.
Pielke explained: “Most of the [IPCC] scenarios were initialized in 2005. We have 16 years of data that we can use to say, ‘All right, how’s the real world doing compared to what we envisioned in the scenarios?’ And it turns out that the most extreme scenario — it’s got this name, RCP 8.5 — is also the most widely used scenario. It’s the one that’s most often referenced in university press releases and finds its way into media reports and so on. But it turns out that that one — we are already so far off track that we can say that scenario is implausible.”
RCP 8.5 envisions the world building tens of thousands of new coal power plants, even while governments are working quickly to phase coal down and out and replace it with lower-emission energies.
“I’m just going to flat out say it. Coal’s going the other way,” Pielke said. “We can say that scenario — it might be fun for kind of exploratory research, but it doesn’t represent a plausible future.”
Pielke’s analysis goes beyond the numbers and deals with the science of communication, taking on a particular sociological shape. He maintains that much of the current state of climate politics comes down to how people are socialized on issues in which there’s a significant nexus between public policy and science.
“There’s all this intense political and social overlay on certain areas of science, and they get really hard to communicate,” he said, adding that it makes extreme views in either direction disproportionately loud.
“It really is difficult, I think, for the layperson to find what’s the center of gravity on climate change because there are so many loud voices out there, and it is so politicized,” he said. “Apocalypse isn’t on the table, and hoax isn’t on the table.”
