Climate deniers are partying like it’s 2009, and it looks like we have to walk thru all this BS yet one more time.
As part of my newest series of interviews with scientists on our current wave of “New Climate Denial”, I spoke with Zeke Hausfather last week.
Some of Zeke’s remarks have been brutally misused by the Climate Denial establishment.
I was on local public TV with a rep from our friendly neighborhood Right Wing Think Tank, the Mackinac Center, a few months ago, and the gentleman mentioned Zeke, purp0rtedly, as a climate scientist who had backed off the well established physics and revised dire predictions for planetary warming.
The real story is that Zeke, and other experts, have recognized that clean energy has become so competitive in recent years, that the worst case scenarios for carbon emissions have become less likely – not that the physics has changed.
It’s rare for technical papers about climate modeling to kick off a heated public debate, or attract attention from the White House.
But that’s what happened recently after an international team of researchers published a major revision of the emissions scenarios used to study global warming.
When scientists try to model how hot Earth could get this century, they typically look at a range of possibilities for how much planet-warming pollution humans might pump into the atmosphere. These scenarios get updated every seven years or so.
In this latest update, the researchers abandoned a dire — and often criticized — high-emissions scenario known as RCP8.5 that has been prominently cited in thousands of climate studies over the past decade. The authors said the scenario was now “implausible” given recent energy trends.
That provoked online arguments among scientists. For years, critics of the high-emissions scenario had argued that it was always unrealistic, in part because it envisioned that countries would burn coal at absurdly high rates. They argued that any studies or news reports relying on that scenario exaggerated the risks of climate change. Why, those critics now asked, did the course correction take so long?
Other researchers, however, noted that scientists still can’t rule outextreme warming, even if the odds might be low, and that there are good scientific reasons for studying high-emissions scenarios.
Last weekend, President Trump weighed in, suggesting that the revision showed that global warming wasn’t a threat and that “the United Nations TOP Climate Committee just admitted that its own projections (RCP8.5) were WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!”
