"Green" policies are destroying this country
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EDIT: Oh, I see you won't be responding 🤔 ... but here goes anyway:
“Most of the academic literature to date has been based on scenarios that are now considered unrealistically pessimistic.”
considered pessimistic by whom?
By the IPCC. Don't you read this stuff? Actually, they screwed up on the double. Originally 3 RCPs (representative concentration pathways) were developed which could represent the baseline (i.e. no policy, business as usual) emissions scenario under different assumptions. These were RCP4.5, RCP 6.0 and RCP8.5. Somewhere during the development of AR5 this information got lost and, as you can see from right hand edge of the following AR5 graph, RCP8.5 was presented as the baseline scenario:
Roll forward to AR6 and suddenly RCP8.5, far from being the baseline, is increasingly implausible. That's a problem because the majority of research in the past decade has used it as such.
Here is the AR6 Working Group III report (https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/), Chapter 3, Box 3.3 (emphasis mine):
Box 3.3 | The Likelihood of High-end Emissions Scenarios
At the time the Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) were published, they included three scenarios that could represent emission developments in the absence of climate policy: RCP4.5, RCP6 and RCP8.5, described as, respectively, low, medium and high-end scenarios in the absence of strong climate policy (van Vuuren et al. 2011). RCP8.5 was described as representative of the top 5% scenarios in the literature. The SSPs-based set of scenarios covered the RCP forcing levels, adding a new low scenario (at 1.9 W m–2). Hausfather and Peters (2020) pointed out that since 2011, the rapid development of renewable energy technologies and emerging climate policy have made it considerably less likely that emissions could end up as high as RCP8.5. Still, emission trends in developing countries track RCP8.5 Pedersen et al. (2020), and high land-use emissions could imply that emissions would continue to do so in the future, even at the global scale (Schwalm et al. 2020). Other factors resulting in high emissions include higher population or economic growth as included in the SSPs (Section 3.3.1) or rapid development of new energy services. Climate projections of RCP8.5 can also result from strong feedbacks of climate change on (natural) emission sources and high climate sensitivity (AR6 WGI Chapter 7), and therefore their median climate impacts might also materialise while following a lower emission path (e.g., Hausfather and Betts 2020). The discussion also relates to a more fundamental discussion on assigning likelihoods to scenarios, which is extremely difficult given the deep uncertainty and direct relationship with human choice. However, it would help to appreciate certain projections (e.g., Ho et al. 2019). All in all, this means that high-end scenarios have become considerably less likely since AR5 but cannot be ruled out. It is important to realise that RCP8.5 and SSP5-8.5 do not represent a typical ‘business-as-usual’ projection but are only useful as high-end, high-risk scenarios. Reference emission scenarios (without additional climate policy) typically end up in the C5–C7 categories included in this assessment.
Even this level of admission by the IPCC is weasely. To say that "climate projections of RCP8.5 can also result from strong feedbacks of climate change on (natural) emission sources and high climate sensitivity" is not good science. The RCP is the emissions scenario; models are supposed to tell us about additional feedbacks. Instead, they're saying: "yeah, we picked the wrong baseline but, you know, tipping points and all that ... it could get just as bad". That's not science, it's padding your estimate with conjecture to generate the desired level of doom. It doesn't help their case that they cite Hausfather and Peters (2020) for support -- that's a blog post, not a peer reviewed article as IPCC guidelines would require. What's more, it doesn't even support their argument:
- it says that models incorporating feedback scenarios have been few and rudimentary
- it says that even models incorporating the worst feedbacks are unlikely to match the RCP8.5 carbon levels
- oh yeah, it also cites no less than Greta Thunberg (NOT a climate scientist) as having "also expressed concern that climate projections typically do not fully incorporate the potential range of carbon-cycle feedbacks."
your argument that future scenarios won’t be as bad as the science suggests is undermined by the present current-day realities of climate change in many parts of the world which are indeed catastrophic.
Nope, sorry, they simply are not. Few of them are significant departures from long term trends.
And you ignore totally the devastating loss of wildlife in the past decades; and increasing ocean acidification and desertification we are seeing. all “doomster porn?” Looking at the effects of wildfires in Hawaii or massive floods in Pakistan, I fail to see much resilience there, but of course we are somewhat more resilient than a century ago, but that’s a moot point.
You conflate a whole bunch of points. Yeah, Pakistan is not resilient, it's a basket case. Who knew?! Devastating loss of wildlife due to climate change? I think you'll find that habitat destruction is a larger factor. Not one that you can fix by building windmills, nor by a dramatic increase in mining to support renewables.
And what was that you were saying about how "the deniers tend not to rebut specific claims as they don't have any evidence, so resort to vague nonsense". You just Gish galloped your way through a bunch of tangential points instead of addressing the actual point -- that the IPCC has based a lot of research on an implausible emissions scenario.
Post edited by Boards.ie: Mike on8 -
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