Last summer, Roger Pielke, Jr. appeared as a guest on Dan Crenshaw’s “We Hold These Truths” video podcast.
Roger Pielke, Jr. probably needs little introduction, but I’ll do one anyway. Pielke is a professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder and Senior Fellow at the Breakthrough Institute. His substack, called The Honest Broker, is here.
Pielke is perhaps best known as a critic of the abuses of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) most extreme global warming scenario, ‘RCP 8.5’.
Pielke also endlessly reminds us that certain types of extreme weather events, such as landfall hurricanes, are not more frequent than ever, media narratives to the contrary.
Dan Crenshaw (R-Houston) may be unfamiliar to anyone not from Texas.
Crenshaw, who describes himself as a ‘rational environmentalist’, is a politician I wish would run for president.
He certainly appears electable, at least to me. He’s young (39) and not bad-looking. And then there’s the eyepatch. In 2012, as a Navy Seal, Crenshaw lost his right eye to an IED in Afghanistan.
Crenshaw’s climate conversation with Pielke was polite and cordial.
And frustrating.
To me, it underscored just how difficult it is in the bipolar media-verse to stake out some middle ground on climate.
Crenshaw spoke to this during the conversation: “It used to be just denier versus alarmist,” he said to Pielke, but “there's a newer debate here, and that's how I feel.”
In a number of places in the interview, Crenshaw gently pressed Pielke to put a number on the extent to which he thought human CO₂ emissions are responsible for global warming:
Crenshaw: “I mean, if you told me 80%, I'd be like, "Okay, okay, I got it."
Before getting to Pielke’s answer, it’s worth pointing out that Roger Pielke, Jr. is not his father. Roger Pielke Senior is a climate scientist with a Ph.D. in meteorology. Roger Pielke, Jr. has a Ph.D. in political science.
Pielke Junior’s thing is more climate policy and economics. On climate science questions, Pielke Junior will often defer, sometimes to Dad.
Pielke was clearly reluctant to come out with a number. He finally provided an answer — of sorts — with:
Pielke: So the IPCC concludes that human influences are responsible for 100% of the temperature increase that's been documented globally over the last 100 years.
The conversation went in other directions after that.
Call me whatever, but I am loath to let the IPCC have the last word.
“What percent of global warming comes from human CO₂?” may be the most important question of the modern era.
On my list, it’s right up there with “Why can’t we all get along?”
Or another question I keep asking myself, “Why do bad dogs happen to good people?”
The stakes riding on the answer are enormous. It’s the rationale for the entire Net Zero project.
In July, Bloomberg opinion writer Mark Gongloff did the sums:
Which might goes down a little easier as $8 trillion a year for the next 27 years.
Gongloff calls this a bargain because the evident alternative, to him anyway, is cataclysm. He’s not alone. If I open the morning paper, or website… here’s one. Bloomberg on Dec. 9, 2023:
UN scientists have warned that greenhouse gas emissions need to fall by at least 43% by 2030 (from 2019 levels) to keep global warming within the 1.5C threshold. The planet is currently on track to warm by 3C at the end of this century, which would be cataclysmic for humans and ecosystems.
Let me put my first sake in the middle ground: I’m not against decarbonization.
As some kind of lodestar, or long-term ideal for the energy system.
When it’s cost effective.
The other goals being things like reliability, affordability, and access. Never forget that 745 million people live without electricity at all.
What I am against is what I call decarbonization with two Ps: precipitate and precipitous.
Which is really a call for deindustrialization. Sorry. Won’t go there.
“But,” you say, “UN scientists have warned that greenhouse gas emissions need to fall by at least 43% by 2030…”
Yeah, I know.
I have some respect for the IPCC.
But my feelings towards it are those you might have toward a co-worker who often does great work, but has a substance abuse problem.
You need to keep track of what’s going on with them.
And the IPCC has a history.
I’ll try to keep it short.
The IPCC doesn’t do scientific research of its own, nor does it monitor the climate.
It does a peculiar thing known as ‘science assessment’.
One fact about climate change is undeniable: there’s been a flood of scientific papers about it. Google says 51,230 were published across 5,796 scientific journals in 2020.
The IPCC is, in theory, sifting through all this.
What its worker bees assess as the good stuff makes its way up the funnel.
Every six years or so, the IPCC authors and editors write big Assessment Reports, summarizing their take on things. The Sixth Assessment Report, ‘AR6’, appeared in March 2023.
I made a point of reading, line-by-line, the AR6 Working Group 1 report, “The Physical Science Basis,” when it came out. It’s 2,409 pages.
I pretended I was reading Torah. It was less enlightening.
Anyway, there’s a lot in there. The shorter Summaries For Policymakers offer a tempting, time-saving alternative.
But discerning readers know those are vetted line-by-line by UN apparatchiks. The Summaries must remain ‘on message’.
‘On message’ brings up the IPCC’s mission.
At the creation, it was “to provide objective scientific information relevant to understanding human-induced climate change, its natural, political, and economic impacts and risks, and possible response options.”
Note the phrase ‘human-induced climate change’. Not all climate change.
Now, if we look at history, as I like to do, it didn’t have to be that way.
‘The Carbon Dioxide Question’, like many things, had its origin in the energy crisis of the 1970s.
Yes, Arrhenius and Callendar had speculated about CO₂-induced warming back in 1896 and 1939. But their work languished in obscurity.
Climate science up to then had mainly been about finding the cause(s) of the Ice Age(s). I’ve written about that here.
There were some exceptionally cold years in the early 1970s. Media speculation of the day was about whether an Ice Age was coming back:
So in 1970s, global warming was pretty much on the back burner.
One of the proposed solutions — in the US, anyway — for the ’70s energy crisis was burning a lot more coal.
Now the downsides of burning coal were well-known, even then. Sulfur dioxide (SO₂) and particulate emissions, to name two. Various science panels were convened to advise on these problems.
In 1975, almost as an afterthought, the possibility that the carbon dioxide produced by burning more coal might affect the climate got added to the research portfolio.
The science administrators of day were conservative and careful. They firmly believed the research into this needed go step-by-step.
Step One would be to greatly improve ‘our general understanding of the dynamics of the world’s climate’, to quote one of them, Alvin Weinberg, writing in 1974.
For any careful scientist, having a good handle on natural climate was obligatory before you could claim, with any certainty or reliability, to have teased out an anthropogenic warming ‘signal’ buried in the background noise.
The research might take decades. Climate, it turned out, was really complicated. Good data, preferably from modern instruments, was short. Timescales in climate are long.
Jump ahead to a hot summer day in 1988. James Hansen’s July 23 testimony to the Senate made the front page of the New York Times:
Politicians, as is their wont, wanted to ‘do something’.
What they didn’t want to do was was wait around for a bunch of academics to make up their minds about what was causing the warming.
If CO₂ was the cause of the warming, the obvious answer was to limit CO₂ emissions.
On July 28, 1988 — less than a week after Hansen’s testimony — Senator Tim Wirth of Colorado introduced the National Energy Policy Act, which called for a 20% reduction in US carbon dioxide emissions from 1988 levels by the year 2000.
The first of so many plans, proposals and targets to come.
The politicians assumed their CO₂ emissions-reduction policy was correct. The science would catch up with it later. The same thing had happened earlier — sort-of — with the ozone scare.
By 1992, the policy baton was in the hands of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Its stated goal of ‘stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere’ was by then endorsed by 154 nations.
That human-emitted greenhouse gases were cause of the warming was obvious to everyone.
Except the IPCC’s scientists. In the First Assessment Report, published in 1990, they warned a definitive answer to the question might not come until well into the 21st century, perhaps as late as 2050.
The Second Assessment Report, when being prepared for publication in 1995, still contained cautionary sentences like: ‘None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed [climate] changes to the specific cause of increases in greenhouse gases.’
That just wouldn’t do. The IPCC needed to give the scientific green light to the policy program. The policy, after all, was already in place.
The pressure was on. The solution came by coup de main. At the last minute, a now-famous line got inserted in Chapter 8: “The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.”
It would not be the last time policy shaped IPCC science.
The politics of the IPCC are reminiscent of those of the Vatican, and about as interesting. Trust me that in 2016, the IPCC underwent a regime change.
Things weren’t going very well. There had been some kind of pause or ‘hiatus’ in the warming.
The targets based on the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere weren’t working out, either.
CO₂ seemed to have a mind of its own. The percent in the atmosphere, (0.0421% as of May 2022), showed a relentless, monotonic increase. CO₂ blew through each successive target without a whole lot of bad happening.
The IPCC’s dominant paradigm of the early 2000s was also getting creaky, as dominant paradigms do. Major oscillations of the oceans, such as El Niño and the Atlantic Multi-Decadal Oscillation (AMO), had emerged as being lot more important than anyone had thought.
‘Multi-Decadal’, by the way, suggests the conservative scientists of the 1970s may have been onto something in advocating patience in climate research. The AMO has a cycle of around 60 years.
When the facts change, if you won’t change your mind, change the message. ‘Global warming’ became ‘climate change’. Extreme weather became its face.
If people assumed that, because the climate changes, it’s we humans who must be changing it, that ambiguity was a messaging bonus.
Still, by 2016, there was a risk that public was getting complaisant. A shot of urgency was needed.
The IPCC changed its communication strategy. It hired some visualization experts and a new head of communications.
The result was the “1.5°” campaign of 2018.
That year’s ‘Special Report’ on SR1.5, marked, by the way, the first appearance of the ‘100%-of-the-warming-is caused-by-humans’ trope mentioned by Roger Pielke, Jr.
Prior to that it had been ‘more than half’. Advanced math reveals that allows up to 49% of the warming to come from somewhere else.
The 1.5° C target was a stretch for the IPCC model-makers. They initially considered it a bit of a joke. “We [had] talked about [1.5 °C],” one said, “but never seriously. It felt so unrealistic and infeasible….”
I’m indebted for that quote and others to one Lisette van Beek, who in March 2022 published a study subtitled “An analysis of political calibration of integrated assessment modeling in light of the 1.5 °C goal.”
I do not share Ms. van Beek’s sympathies for ‘political calibration’. But I thank her for including in her paper quotes from the interviews she did with IPCC staff.
The staff eventually discovered the models could be made to work for 1.5°.
If, for example, the recommended policy changes incorporated “radical lifestyle changes and discontinued economic growth.”
“Negative emissions technologies’ — then as now largely hypothetical — also helped make the numbers come out.
When all was said and done, 1.5° was a big success.
In the way an ad campaign might be.
Ms. van Beek quotes a member of the UNFCCC secretariat: "This [1.5°] message was … elevated by the IPCC co-chairs during the [2018] press release and quickly became the new ‘catchy number’ reiterated in all government speeches in the following climate negotiations."
The communicators did had a few second thoughts. To raise urgency, they had intentionally gone out on a limb and embraced ‘climate deadline-ism’.
That may have backfired. “[E]missions reductions by 2030 were interpreted by influential media such as The Guardian, CNN and The Independent as ‘we only have 12 years left’.”
No mention of whether the 1.5° target was remotely realizable. "At the end of the day,” one staffer said, “if Greta can't communicate your idea to half a million young people, then in the world of action, it is not very much used.”
Indeed.
We’ve had enough years of climate reporting to enjoy its seasonal cycles.
‘Hottest year ever’ stories usually pop up in January, like daffodils.
This year, with the El Niño summer, some appeared early.
‘Mauna Loa’ stories, reporting the year's peak atmospheric CO₂ concentration, appear in May, like bearded iris.
A few years back a new perennial started appearing around Thanksgiving. These offer advice, presumably to young people, about how to talk to your doddering relatives about climate change at family dinners.
A New York Times piece from Nov. 20, 2019 is a good archetype. It ran under the headline “When Thanksgiving Dinner Comes With a Side Dish of Climate Denial.”
It advises young people that, “it’s time to get ready in case climate myths come up at the dinner table.”
That brought to historian Uncle Will’s addled brain the title of a thin pamphlet put out by Situationist International author Raoul Vaneigem in 1967: “Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations.”
‘Savoir-vivre’ is usually translated ‘good manners’, but here better translated ‘how to live’.
Uncle Will came up with this advice for his nieces and nephews:
You don’t need to run.
Yes, it’s warming. But not by very much, or very fast. The rate is around 0.2° C per decade.
That’s way less than the time you all were arguing about the thermostat.
Sea level is rising, too, about 2-4 mm per year.
But unless you're really slow, you should be able to keep ahead of it.
It’s been getting warmer since the Little Ice Age.
No, that was a long time ago. Not even Nana remembers that.
The CO₂ you’ve heard about is way less than we have out back in the greenhouse.
Because the plants like it, that’s why.
Your Uncle thinks the warming is largely natural and only a bit is coming from human CO₂ emissions. So stopping them won’t stop the warming.
Get used to it.
At the dinner table, the polite word for “Get used to it” is “adaptation”.
Try the roasted Brussels sprouts. You’ll like them.