Links tagged “models”

Antarctic penguins could experience a ‘population boom’ due to global warming as melting sea ice means they have to spend less time foraging for food.

Donna Laframboise: "RCP8.5, I think of it as Ridiculous Climate Prophecy" - "Fairy tales to describe how humans might impact the climate by the year 2100." 

It can’t become reality, they point out, unless humanity burns five times more coal than we currently do, “an amount larger than some estimates of recoverable coal reserves.” Whenever RCP8.5 gets mentioned, they say, it should be clearly labelled as an “unlikely worst case.”

Incredibly, that ‘major scientific report’ (National Climate Assessment) takes RCP8.5 seriously. Calling it a “core scenario,” page 6 of the report presents it as a realistic possibility rather than a farfetched hallucination:

"RCP8.5 is generally associated with higher population growth, less technological innovation, and higher carbon intensity of the global energy mix."

This means the report is junk. No matter how many federal agencies were involved in its creation. But the New York Times didn’t tell readers that.

"Calls to follow the science are heard almost daily from politicians and activists — and many scientists. But what are they advocating? When a politician who declares “I believe in the science” (as per U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren), it’s akin to admitting lack of knowledge about the science behind whatever policy is being promulgated. And what if, as is too often the case, the science politicians are following is tainted and falls into the great science world where deliberate distortions and exaggerations — even fabrications — are common?"

Junk Science Week: "The purpose of global climate policy is to get us from the dangerous upper end of the forecast range down to the safe bottom end. But what users of climate projections need to understand is that we are already there. In fact, we never left it. We don’t need to kill the global economy to get onto an emissions path we’ve always been on. If we want to avoid the RCP8.5 future scenario all we have to do is stop feeding it into climate models, because that’s the only place it exists."