Honest Brokerage

Monday, August 26, 2024

Honest Brokerage

Roger Pielke, Jr., is a researcher with a doctorate in political science who has studied a wide range of issues regarding science, public policy, and politics. He blogs at his popular Substack page, The Honest Broker. Much of his more widely read and controversial work has had to do with climate science and research, particularly for his critical view of how climate science and research are frequently mischaracterized and bent to fit preferred narratives rather than what the scientific data support.

As it turns out, I was familiar with his father’s work in the area of climate research from the late 1990s. Roger Pielke, Sr., is an emeritus professor of meteorology at Colorado State University. He posted a lot of his research findings online in the early years of the internet. At the time, he was skeptical of the focus on manmade global warming as a popular obsession, but not of that human activity was causing the global climate to warm. His view was that humans were causing changes to the earth’s climate system in more complex ways than only by releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. He argued the changes also came by patterns of land use. Cutting down forests, for instance, in order to plant fields of crops or to graze livestock, would quite logically impact climate patterns at a scale beyond the local, by changing the way the surface reflects solar energy back into the upper atmosphere and out to space, the way surface moisture is lost, and myriad other more complex ways.

At any rate, Roger Pielke, Jr., the Honest Broker, has frequently written about how weak the claims are about climate change in the popular narrative. There is very little evidence to support the idea that a warming global climate is a cause of more frequent extreme weather events like tornadoes, wildfires, floods, or hurricanes. Pielke, Jr., has presented the statistical evidence to support this conclusion, while at the same time pointing out that not even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) describes any urgent crisis. In fact, the alarmist stance is almost exclusively a view promoted by a subset of aggressively activist academics and their boosters in the press who have raised the false alarm and refused to stop inciting panic.

Pielke, Jr., recently ran a six-part series discussing the issue of climate-fueled extreme weather in which he describes his main objections. At the same time, he explains that he also believes human-caused climate change is an issue that needs to be taken seriously and addressed. His summary in the sixth essay is something of a tl;dr version of the series:

Let me make one point very clear — The inability of the climate science community to predict the future does not mean that climate change is not happening, that changes in climate are insignificant, or that humans are not influencing the climate system. The IPCC is very clear that humans are influencing the climate system through greenhouse gas emissions, land use change, particulate air pollution and other factors — And those changes poses risks.

Think of it like this: We can’t predict the state of the economy in 2040, but we know that economic policy is important. Neither you nor I can predict when we might become ill, but I know that health policy is important. Irreducible uncertainty does not mean zero risk.

The human influence on climate is thus not about certainties and crystal balls, but risk management and no regrets.

The steady flow of misinformation about climate science fails to accurately reflect what the IPCC and underlying literature actually says. To the extent that such misinformation influences how decision makers think about the climate system and risk, it undermines the discussion, development, and implementation of robust policies in the face of irreducible uncertainties.

That set of conclusions seems reasonable and fair. But taking things seriously does not automatically justify any and every expenditure made into reorganizing the energy system with unaffordable and impractical boondoggles. Projects like electric cars and wind farms and solar panels should stand on their own merits. The distortions caused by mandates, subsidies, and restrictions on traditional energy sources are not that. Of course, this has been the basic complaint of skeptics all along: that the catastrophic claims from activists are meant to induce panic rather than rational consideration. The panic is then given as requiring action that is costly and unwise, and that benefits specific vested interests producing “renewable” energy and battery-electric vehicles as they enrich themselves.