Guest commentary by Kerry Emanuel
Executive Summary
Chapter 6 of the draft DOE report examines whether global warming exacerbates extreme weather. It rightly notes that because events such as hurricanes are rare, detecting their response to climate change in short and imperfect historical records is extremely difficult—if not impossible. Yet the authors devote most of the remainder of the chapter to attempting just that. By omitting to frame such efforts in the context of theory and models, they commit three fundamental errors: 1) searching for trends where none were predicted, 2) neglecting important variables for which trends were predicted and 3) overlooking—or failing to acknowledge—that some predicted trends are of a magnitude that is not a priori detectable in existing noisy and short data sets. The draft report also overlooks recent literature on climate change effects on weather extremes, and quotes selectively and misleadingly from the most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). For these reasons, I find much of Chapter 6 to be of questionable utility. There are at least three climate change-induced trends in hurricane-related hazards that were predicted theoretically, simulated by models, and confirmed by observations:
- Hurricanes are producing more rain, causing increased flooding. As water, not wind, is the source of most damage and mortality in hurricanes, this is the most consequential scientific finding.
- The proportion of hurricanes that reach high intensity is increasing.
- Hurricanes are intensifying more rapidly.
There is no robust scientific finding that hurricane frequency is increasing or expected to increase. Thus, much of Chapter 6 of the DOE report is devoted to refuting a hypothesis unsupported by scientific consensus. The short section on tornadoes does not include other more destructive aspects of severe convective storms, such as hail and damaging straight-line winds, and as with the section on hurricanes, omits inferences from theory and models.
[This commentary is also available as a pdf file]
- Introduction
- The Problem with Extreme Event Attribution
- The Importance of theory and models
- Selective Quotation of AR6
- Other omissions
- Summary
Introduction
The purpose of the DOE report is stated clearly by Secretary of Energy Chris Wright in his foreword. He begins by noting that “we are told—relentlessly—that the very energy systems that enabled this progress now pose an existential threat. Hydrocarbon-based fuels, the argument goes, must be rapidly abandoned or else we risk planetary ruin.” To counter this narrative, he commissioned this report “to encourage a more thoughtful and science-based conversation about climate change and energy.” This objective aligns well with the stated purpose of the six full reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), “to provide policymakers with regular scientific assessments on climate change, its implications and potential future risks, as well as to put forward adaptation and mitigation options”. One may presume that Secretary Wright, who has reviewed IPCC reports, wanted to build a bridge between their highly detailed technical content and the overly simplified and sometimes exaggerated narratives issuing from news outlets. Indeed, this DOE report relies heavily, though not exclusively, on recent IPCC reports.
As a scientist who has devoted much of his career to understanding tropical cyclones (TCs, aka “hurricanes”), severe convective storms and their relationship to climate, I thought it important to review this new DOE report for scientific accuracy, focusing exclusively on the discussion TCs and severe convective storms in Chapter 6, “Extreme Weather”. Herewith, my findings.
The Problem with Extreme Event Attribution
What constitutes an “extreme event”? One presumes it to mean an event that is damaging and rare. These two attributes go together: Society is well adapted to frequent events and most damage arises from unusual events like strong TCs. Empirically, we know that long-term damage from natural hazards is usually dominated by events that occur less frequently, on a regional scale, than about once in 50 years. In a nutshell, the problem is that robust detection of even once-in-50-year events requires about 500 years of observations, which we do not begin to have. The authors of the DOE report are well aware of this problem, stating on p. 46 that “Climate is about the statistical properties of weather over decades, not single events. Further, there are only about 130 years of reliable observational records that can be analyzed statistically. That brief interval does not begin to contain all the extreme events that the climate system can create on its own.” The authors also recognize that in a short record of extreme events, “If no trend is detected, then clearly there is no basis for attribution. But even where a trend is observed, attribution to human-caused warming does not necessarily follow.” In other words, extreme event attribution is difficult if not impossible based on historical records alone. But they should have added that the absence of evidence in short, noisy time series is not evidence of an absence of a trend.
What is odd about the rest of Chapter 6 is that it based mostly on attempts to detect trends in noisy and often suspect data, just what the authors said cannot be done. Once more, they are selective in presenting this evidence, ignoring locations and metrics that do show – and often were predicted to show – upward trends.
A good example is found on p. 50, where citing published research on continental U.S. landfalling hurricanes, they state that “While the largest numbers of landfalling hurricanes are from 2004, 2005 and 2020, there is no statistically significant trend since 1920”. They are correct. But in stating this, they seem to overlook their earlier statements recognizing that no plausible trend is detectable in a record this short and noisy. Let’s look at this more quantitatively. A minimum estimate of noise in this record is Poisson noise based on the observed long-term annual mean of U.S. landfalling hurricanes of about 2.2. (In reality, the “noise” includes natural variability as well as human climate influences other than greenhouse gas warming.) I created 10,000 times series spanning 1920-2024 consisting of an imposed linear trend of a 20% increase over the period and Poisson noise based on an average of 2.2 events per year. Only about 12% of these series have positive slopes detectable at the conventional statistical significance level of 95%. Stated another way, one has, a priori, only about a 12% chance of detecting the imposed upward trend at conventional levels of statistical significance. Even if one imposes an upward trend of 50%, there is still only a 40% probability of detecting the trend amidst the noise. When it comes to major hurricane landfalls, at only about one per year, the detection problem is even worse.
The DOE report should not have merely stated that “the relatively short historical record of hurricane activity, and the even shorter record from the satellite era, is not sufficient to assess whether recent hurricane activity is unusual relative to the background natural variability. It should have added that the observational data set cannot rule out even large underlying trends in U.S. landfalling hurricanes, and that there is no robust scientific consensus that the frequency of TCs – landfalling or not – should increase. These important omissions stem from the authors’ decision not to discuss theoretical and model-based evidence for changing TC climatology.
The Importance of theory and models
Throughout the history of science, theory and models have played an important role not only in advancing understanding but in assessing risks. An example is global warming itself. Around the turn of the last century century, the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius predicted (Arrhenius 1896, 1906) that the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would lead to warming at a rate of about 4 K per doubling. Not long after accurate measurements of CO2 commenced in 1958, the increase of it and other greenhouse gases was firmly established, and well before the end of the 20th century Arrhenius’s prediction of greenhouse gas-induced warming was confirmed. In 1979, the National Academy of Sciences commissioned a report about climate change, authored by some of the leading atmospheric scientists and oceanographers of that period, led by Jule Charney (National Research Council 1979). The report estimated that the equilibrium response of global mean temperature to a doubling of CO2 would be 3 ± 1.5ºC, based on physics, simple models, and the rather primitive general circulation models then available. Contemporary estimates of equilibrium climate sensitivity are similar, and there has been little or no reduction in the uncertainty of this prediction. It may well be several decades before observations pin down the true sensitivity of climate to changes in greenhouse gas
concentrations.
A wonderful example of the interplay of theory and observations in science is gravitational radiation. Its existence was predicted by general relativity, but its detection presented formidable practical challenges, requiring the design and construction of large and expensive antennas. The project, called LIGO, involved roughly 1,000 scientists and many more amateur volunteers. It was the most expensive single project ever funded by the National Science Foundation and finally succeeded in detecting gravitational radiation in 2016.
There are two interesting differences between the climate and LIGO examples. First, it is unlikely that gravitational radiation would have been detected by now had there been no theoretical predictions of its existence, whereas global warming would have become obvious even without a prediction. Second, as far as we know, gravitational radiation has no effect on human welfare. For this reason, the LIGO scientists could and did demand an extraordinary level of statistical significance before they were ready to declare that a signal had been detected. In contrast, global warming may have serious implications for our well-being and thereby constitutes a risk.
There is a world of difference between signal detection and risk assessment. In the case of extreme weather events, we can and indeed must assess risks largely in the absence of statistically significant signal detection. As Verner Suomi, then head of the Climate Research Board, stated in his foreword to the Charney report, “A wait-and-see policy may mean waiting until it is too late”. For this reason, the absence of a theoretical and modelling component to Chapter 6 of the DOE report represents a serious omission that calls into question the scholarly rigor of the report. The report dismisses the whole endeavor with two sentences on page 46:
Process-based understanding and simple thermodynamic arguments have been invoked to assert that warming is worsening extreme weather events. However, it is naïve to assume that any recent extreme
event is caused by human influences on the climate.
This is worse than simply dismissing theory and models as relevant to the problem: with their use of the word “however”, the authors link process-based understanding and simple thermodynamic arguments to the fallacy that climate change can be inferred from single extreme events. This is just wrong. Theory and models can and have been used both to understand and predict global and regional changes in the
statistics of extreme events, and to put particular extreme events in the context of expectations
based on theory and models. Both of these are legitimate scientific endeavors.
Any legitimate effort to summarize the current scientific understanding of changes in extreme events would focus on theory and models, given that historical records are too short and flawed for purpose. Here are three examples of predictions of extreme events based on theory and models that are supported by historical records.
The first is rainfall extremes associated with tropical cyclones (and many other meteorological phenomena). Air ascending in the cores of tropical cyclones is very nearly water saturated through the whole atmospheric column, and its water vapor content is governed by the Clausius-Clapyron equation, a bedrock principle of thermodynamics that shows that saturated water vapor content nearly doubles for each 10ºC of temperature increase. This strongly suggests that a given TC will produce more rain, an important consideration given that water kills far more people in TCs than wind. This could be compensated by weakening vertical motion in the core, but as discussed presently, we expect the opposite. And, yes, TCs could become less frequent. But to ignore this fundamental piece of physics is a serious omission.
Quite a few studies have set particular TC-related flooding events in the context of theoretical and modeling-based expectations of the effects of climate change. For example, three independent analyses of the flooding of Houston, TC by Hurricane Harvey of 2017 (van Oldenborgh et al. 2017; Risser and Wehner, 2017; Emanuel, 2017a) concluded that climate change had already palpably increased the probability of TC-related rain of the observed magnitude and a fourth study (Trenberth et al., 2018) directly attributed Harvey’s extreme rainfall to the warmth of the Gulf of Mexico. Yes, this is a strictly local analysis, of necessity because rainfall in not reliably measured over oceans, but examining how climate change affects extreme weather in highly populated areas is nevertheless a valuable enterprise. The three research papers cited above, and other similar papers, were cited by AR6 but ignored in the DOE report.
Examining tropical cyclone rainfall observations across the eastern U.S., Kunkel et al. (2010) concluded that “During 1994–2008, the number of TC-associated events was more than double the long-term average while the total annual national number of events was about 25% above the long-term (1895–2008) average”, and that “While there has been a recent increase in the number of landfalling U.S. hurricanes, the increase in TC-associated heavy events is much higher than would be expected from the pre-1994 association between the two”. These findings led the IPCC AR6 to conclude that “there is medium confidence that anthropogenic forcing has contributed to observed heavy rainfall events over the USA associated with TCs and other regions with sufficient data coverage”. This was omitted from the DOE report.
Going back to research conducted in the early 1950s (Riehl, 1950; Kleinschmidt, 1951), we have come to understand that TC wind speeds are bounded by the thermodynamic state of the ocean and atmosphere. This upper limit, called potential intensity, can be calculated from standard climate data in analyses and models, and when the peak intensity of individual observed TCs is divided by the potential intensity at the time and location the peak occurred, the results fall into a universal probability distribution (Emanuel, 2000). This implies that a change in potential intensity will be reflected in the actual peak intensities of TCs, but has no implication for overall TC frequency. An increase in potential intensity should increase the proportion of high intensity TCs relative to all TCs. It can also be shown the vertical motion in TC cores is proportional to their intensity.
Simple calculations with single-column and global models indicate that increasing greenhouse gases will increase potential intensity (Emanuel, 1987). Such an increase is indeed evident in reanalysis data (Bhatia et al., 2022; Studholme et al., 2021). Moreover, an increase in the proportion of TC observations that are at major hurricane (categories 3-5) intensity has been detected in satellite-based estimates of TC intensity that account for changing radiometer technology (Kossin et al., 2020). This is an example of a theoretical prediction supported by careful observational analysis. Once again, this work was discussed in AR6 but not mentioned in the DOE report. Instead, the report presents a non-peer-reviewed graphic of global TC frequencies (Figure 6.2.2, p. 49). This shows no statistically significant trends in either hurricanes or major hurricanes, but there is a statistically significant trend in their ratio, which is not mentioned in the DOE report. The theoretical prediction pertained to this last quantity, not to the other two. Indeed, throughout the DOE report there is an implied prediction that TC frequencies should increase with warming, whereas there has never been a robust scientific consensus about how TC frequency responds to climate change. In that sense, the DOE report sets up a strawman (that TC frequency should increase with warming) and knocks it down, while avoiding observational tests of actual scientific predictions (e.g. that TC rainfall extremes and the proportion of very intense TCs will increase).
Another theoretical prediction is that the rate of intensification of tropical cyclones should increase with global warming, and do so at a normalized rate faster than that of intensity itself (Emanuel 2017b; Bhatia et al., 2018). Such a trend has been detected in North Atlantic tropical cyclone intensification rates (Bhatia et al., 2019). This is important, as rapid intensification just prior to landfall can catch forecasters off guard and reduce the time window in which residents can prepare and evacuate.
Selective Quotation of AR6
Three quotations of AR6 are presented at the beginning of section 6.2 of the DOE report, p. 48:
There is low confidence in most reported long-term (multidecadal to centennial) trends in TC frequency or intensity-based metrics due to changes in the technology used to collect the best-track data. (IPCC, 2021 p. 1585)
It is likely that the global proportion of major (Category 3–5) tropical cyclone occurrence has increased over the last four decades . . . There is low confidence in long-term (multi-decadal to centennial) trends in the frequency of all-category tropical cyclones. (IPCC, 2023 SPM p. 9)
A subset of the best-track data corresponding to hurricanes that have directly impacted the United States since 1900 is considered to be reliable, and shows no trend in the frequency of U.S. landfall events. (IPCC, 2021, p. 1585)
All three quotations pertain to what can be inferred from the historical record alone. An important context, that there is no consensus on what might happen to TC frequency, is not mentioned. But IPCC reports use all available scientific information to assess climate risk, not just historical records. This is particularly important in the case of weather extremes, for which the historical record is usually too short to detect plausible trends, as fully acknowledged early in the DOE report.
Here is what Working Group I of AR6 said about historical tropical cyclone trends in their
summary for policy makers (p. 9):
It is likely that the global proportion of major (Category 3–5) tropical cyclone occurrence has increased over the last four decades, and it is very likely that the latitude where tropical cyclones in the western North Pacific reach their peak intensity has shifted northward; these changes cannot be explained by internal variability alone (medium confidence). There is low confidence in long-term (multi-decadal to centennial) trends in the frequency of all-category tropical cyclones.
Event attribution studies and physical understanding indicate that human-induced climate change increases heavy precipitation associated with tropical cyclones (high confidence), but data limitations inhibit clear detection of past trends on the global scale.
Note that the trend in the latitude at which TCs reach peak intensity is passed over in the DOE report, as is the statement that attribution studies and physical understanding indicate, with high confidence, that human-induced climate change should increase TC-related rainfall. On page 1519, Working Group 1 further notes that:
The global frequency of TC rapid intensification events has likely increased over the past four decades.
There is no mention of this in the DOE report. With regard to the future, AR6 states (p. 16) that:
The proportion of intense tropical cyclones (Category 4–5) and peak wind speeds of the most intense tropical cyclones are projected to increase at the global scale with increasing global warming (high confidence). {8.2, 11.4, 11.7, 11.9, Cross-Chapter Box 11.1, Box TS.6, TS.4.3.1} (Figure SPM.5, Figure SPM.6)
and, on p. 71,
There is high confidence that average peak TC wind speeds and the proportion of Category 4–5 TCs will increase with warming and that peak winds of the most intense TCs will increase.
These statements about future projections of TC hazards are missing from the DOE report.
Other omissions
The DOE report attributes multi-decadal oscillations of North Atlantic TC metrics to a putative Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation. However, since the AR6 was finalized, new evidence has emerged pointing to anthropogenic sulfate aerosols as the source of the North Atlantic hurricane drought of the 1970s and 80s (Murakami 2022; Rousseau-Rizzi and Emanuel, 2022). This had been suggested in earlier work (Booth et al., 2012; Dunstone et al., 2013; Mann and Emanuel, 2006), but the calculated radiative forcing by sulfate aerosols alone could only account for about half the cooling of tropical North Atlantic sea surface temperatures. Sulfate aerosols of European origin have been shown to have weakened the African summer monsoon, drying soils there and leading the documented increase in African mineral dust lofting during this period (Prospero, 2015). The addition of African mineral dust accounts for the missing radiative forcing over the tropical Atlantic (Rousseau-Rizzi and Emanuel, 2022). This makes a difference to future projections of North Atlantic TC activity, since it is unlikely that high concentrations of sulfate will return.
The DOE report devotes one half of page 66 to tornadoes, and none to straight-line winds or to hail, which causes roughly twice as much damage as tornadoes in the U.S. In Figure 6.5.1 on p.67 they present a non-peer-reviewed analysis of trend in U.S. tornado statistics. The upward trend in weak tornadoes from 1950 to 1990 is, rightly, dismissed as a consequence of more reporting, the advent of hand-held video cameras, etc. But the downward trend in violent tornadoes is given credence despite the rapidly changing technology for estimating tornadic winds during this period, including the advent of ground transportable Doppler radar. This appears to be an amateurish effort by scientists with little or no familiarity with tornadoes to produce their own analysis, dismissing upward trends while holding downward trends to be credible.
AR6 makes it clear that the detection of trends in small-scale events like severe convective storms is, at present, nearly impossible:
In nearly all regions, there is low confidence in changes in hail, ice storms, severe storms, dust storms, heavy snowfall, and avalanches, although this does not indicate that these CIDs [Climate Impact Drivers] will not be affected by climate change. For such CIDs, observations are often short-term or lack homogeneity, and models often do not have sufficient resolution or accurate parametrizations to adequately simulate them over climate change time scales.
Yet AR6 presents an extensive discussion of what theory and models do say about likely trends in severe convective events, devoting a whole subsection (11.7.3) to the subject. While we can, at present, neither reliably detect nor explicitly model trends in severe convective storms, we can use our extensive knowledge of the large-scale conditions that conduce to such events to make some inferences about likely changes. According to AR6:
Climate models consistently project environmental changes that would support an increase in the frequency and intensity of severe thunderstorms that combine tornadoes, hail, and winds (high confidence), but there is low confidence in the details of the projected increase.
As with TCs, the DOE report ignores inferences from theory and models.
Summary
Among the more serious potential consequences of climate change are changes in the incidence of severe convective storms and tropical cyclones. Almost by definition, damaging storms are rare and historical records are generally not long enough or of high enough quality to reliably detect trends. The DOE report clearly recognizes this shortcoming, yet relies almost entirely on analysis of historical trends in extreme events to reach conclusions that are only partially and selectively in agreement with those of the far more comprehensive IPCC AR6, ignoring important evidence from theory and models reported therein or in subsequent peer-reviewed literature. They stress the finding that there are no statistically significant trends in, e.g., U.S. landfalling hurricane frequency, while not informing the reader that a) there was never a consensus prediction of such a trend and b) that plausible trends cannot be detected given the random noise and natural variability in the series. At the same time, they ignore more recent peer-reviewed literature as well as non-peer-reviewed data they themselves present that show an upward trend in the proportion of tropical cyclone intensity estimates that are of major hurricane intensity, a trend that was predicted. They do not directly address the AR6 finding that tropical cyclone rainfall is likely to increase, based on simple physics, or that TC intensification rates are likely to rise. These are serious omissions, as flooding is the main source of mortality and damage in tropical cyclones, and increasing intensification rates will shorten the time window for preparations and evacuation.
The DOE report gives scant attention to the problem of severe convective storms, which do more damage than tropical cyclones, both in the U.S. and worldwide. The report presents time series of both weak and violent U.S. tornadoes, dismissing the upward trend of the former as unreliable yet giving credence to the downward trend in the latter, despite large changes in reporting and measurement technology over the period. They do not address the problem of hail, which is twice as damaging as tornadoes in the U.S. As with tropical cyclones, they ignore theory- and model-based evidence of climate change effects on severe convective storms.
Secretary Wright commissioned the DOE report to “to encourage a more thoughtful and science-based conversation about climate change and energy.” One presumes that by “more thoughtful” he meant in relation to hyped media reports. What better way to foster thoughtful, science-based discussion than to hear from a broad array of scientists who devote their professional lives to understanding climate? That is just what the IPCC reports accomplish. By selectively quoting from the latest such report, by refusing to consider theory or models, and by relying on short and often error-prone historical time series that the authors themselves recognize as not fit for purpose, the DOE is presenting a distorted view of the science of climate effects on extreme weather that is bound to mislead the public.
Book Reference
Arrhenius, S., 1906: Die vermutliche Ursache der Klimaschwankungen. Meddelanden från K.
Vetenskapsakademiens Nobelinstitut
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Good luck Kerry, you’re going to need it.
Thank you for this thoughtful analysis Kerry. It is very helpful for non-experts in this field (like me) to understand both:
1. the complexity, depth and levels of certainty in the science; and
2. how the DOE report is a selective and distorted analysis.
Quote:
The purpose of the DOE report is stated clearly by Secretary of Energy Chris Wright in his foreword. He begins by noting that “we are told—relentlessly—that the very energy systems that enabled this progress now pose an existential threat. Hydrocarbon-based fuels, the argument goes, must be rapidly abandoned or else we risk planetary ruin.” To counter this narrative, he commissioned this report “to encourage a more thoughtful and science-based conversation about climate change and energy.”
No where else does Kerry Emanuel discuss any energy use c0nnection with science, the climate nor being a driver of “Extreme Weather”.
No where does Kerry Emanuel discuss the scientific fact that the EPA Endangerment Finding costing hundreds of billions and therefore impacting the welfare of all American citizens every day, barely raises global warming temp by 0.003 to 0.005 degree centigrade–which Kerry Emanuel’s climate models already prove would have ZERO REAL IMPACT on the INTENSITY of Tropic Cyclones this century.
What better way to avoid a more thoughtful and science-based conversation about climate change and energy than to ignore half the topic completely. That is just what Kerry Emanuel did.
By selectively quoting from the DoE report, and by refusing to consider Energy at all makes this commentary not fit for purpose. Kerry Emanuel’s unbalanced and distorted view of the interaction of climate and energy on extreme weather misleads the public.
No matter the opinion of Kerry Emanuel, the IPCC or modelling climate scientists they have no Authority to dictate Public Policy or to control the debate.
“the scientific fact that the EPA Endangerment Finding costing hundreds of billions and therefore impacting the welfare of all American citizens every day, barely raises global warming temp by 0.003 to 0.005 degree centigrade–which Kerry Emanuel’s climate models already prove would have ZERO REAL IMPACT on the INTENSITY of Tropic Cyclones this century.”
I don’t think Berhard’s words mean what he thinks they mean…
The argument from the DOE is: since there is much uncertainty in the scale of climate change due to GHG emissions, then we might as well continue with our current energy system.
The author here says that the premice of the uncertainty in the scale of climate change due to GHG emissions is missleading at best, indeed manipulative. Hence, the argument for DOE cannot hold in this context.
It is not about dictating Public Policy, it is about reporting science in a proper way. If then you think that existing science and knowledge leads to favoring some policy choices over others, that is not science dictating choice, that is your reasoning and logic leading you to fact-based decision-making. If you think the decisions which thereby appear to be necessary are not desirable, then you are free to use your imagination and work to find better, alternative, solutions which would suit your taste better.
Bernhard No matter the opinion of Kerry Emanuel, the IPCC or modelling climate scientists they have no Authority to dictate Public Policy or to control the debate.
Whau, spoken like a Trump’s DOE spokesperson: Roma locuta ( Trump: “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive”) causa finita (“Bernhard”: we won’t let the science dictate the “Public Policy’..
To paraphrase Marx :”Whom are you going to believe – our Glorious Leader or your lying eyes (science)”
Piotr, I think you have misinterpreted Bernard. When he says “No matter the opinion of Kerry Emanuel, the IPCC or modelling climate scientists they have no Authority to dictate Public Policy or to control the debate.” I suspect he means he believes climate scientists are forcing a selective list of mitigation solutions onto the public. We have heard all this before from the guy using sock puppets like PP, Dharma etc,etc. Bernard is another sock puppet. Refer to Gavins response to Bernard posted on Climate Scientists response to DOE report.
This sock puppet guy with the big ego has a complaint that appears to be that the IPCC reports focus too much on technical solutions like renewables, and dont list his preferred options like de-industrialisation and simplification and global socialism. Remember the sock puppets have relentlessly attacked renewables. Im basing it on several comments the sock puppets have made.
Climate scientists don’t control public policy, anyway ie determining what mitigation tools are used. They have presumably helped contribute to the IPCC mitigation chapter, that presents some mitigation options. Nobody is forced to use these.
In fact the IPCC reports do obliquely refer to de-industrialisation and simplification and do suggest we must meaningfully reduce energy use. But perhaps not enough for multi troll.
I agree with most of your assessments.
Nigel: “Piotr, I think you have misinterpreted Bernard”..
Nigel, I am not sure how. How is his: “ No matter the opinion of Kerry Emanuel, the IPCC or modelling climate scientists they have no Authority to dictate Public Policy or to control the debate.
anything else BUT a wide accusation of climate scientists of usurping the right to dictate “Public Policy” and to silence the opposing voices???
An accusation made even more absurd, by the fact that it is Bernhard’s side – the Project 2025 ideologues and Trump, who have both the will and the power to take over EPA, DOE, NASA, to use it to degrade climate science, and fire or threaten scientists into silence, after which they can “dictate Public Policy” informed not by the best science, but by their MAGA anti-science and anti-environment ideology, and the fossil fuel lobby interests that support them.
When they tell you whom they are, believe them.
Bernhard ,
If you were to actually read Climate Working Group (2025) ‘A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate’ properly, you would see that Christopher Wright does not set out to “to counter this narrative – ‘Hydrocarbon-based fuels, the argument goes, must be rapidly abandoned or else we risk planetary ruin.” He states only that this “view demands scrutiny” adding that “To provide clarity and balance, I asked a diverse team of independent experts to critically review the current state of climate science, with a focus on how it relates to the United States.”
And voilà, your insincere-sounding objections to the lack of discussion of energy [your bold] is also benothinged. For his review, there is no mention of energy [your bold] in the commission. It is to “review the current state of climate science, with a focus on how it relates to the United States.” [My bold]
“…to counter this narrative – ‘Hydrocarbon-based fuels, the argument goes, must be rapidly abandoned or else we risk planetary ruin.” He states only that this “view demands scrutiny”
Even the most cursory scrutiny would show that hydrocarbon-based fuels cannot be rapidly abandoned. That is simply because they are needed for transportation in the vehicles that deliver food and all of the materials needed to finish the energy transition to renewables and EVs. And that will take decades to complete.
“…the scientific fact that the EPA Endangerment Finding costing hundreds of billions…”
OK, Bernhard, let’s have the citation or citations in the scientific literature showing or even suggesting this to be true.
We’ll wait.
Bernard has yet to reply. But I already stated that we cannot rapidly abandoned the use of “dangerous’ fossil fuels for transportation. If we did the costs to consumers of that lost energy for transportation would be immense, easily hundreds of billons. How else would we transport anything of significance until EVs eventually replace all those conventional vehicles…including aircrafts.
Ken wrote:
First, you don’t define “rapidly,” which means that there is no way to either confirm or falsify your statement.
Second, you don’t support your contention that “lost energy for transportation” would “easily” cost hundreds of billions over some unspecified time frame with any evidence, barring of course pure rhetoric. And I and others have previously pointed out that there would be no transition without adequate substitutions for actual needs, and that many applications already have equivalent, or in some cases, superior technological successors, so your ‘lost energy’ is in fact a ‘lost straw man.’
Third, the Endangerment Finding does not rise or fall on the effects on motor vehicles or the economy: it simply states that the pollution that new {ICE} motor vehicles causes endangers “both the public health and the public welfare of current and future generations.” This is a simple finding of fact, and as such makes no specific policy recommendation, either explicitly or even implicitly–though it most certainly provides a solid basis for policy-making. So, it is literally impossible for the Endangerment Finding to “cost hundreds of billions” on that basis.
Fourth, and going beyond the finding itself, toxic pollution from ICE vehicles kills thousands every year via lung disease, sickens more, and costs billions in lost productivity. Add in the tens of thousands–conservatively!–of climate-related deaths and illnesses, the millions of displaced persons, the tens of billions in climate disaster damages, and the damage to the biosphere and ecosystem and their related services to humans, and I think you will find that that the putative “hundreds of billions” it would supposedly cost to upgrade our transportation looks like a pretty good deal.
Oh, and then there’s this:
“No matter the opinion of Kerry Emanuel, the IPCC or modelling climate scientists they have no Authority to dictate Public Policy or to control the debate.”
Any rational person can see that Dr. Emanuel makes no attempt whatever to:
1) dictate Public Policy; or
2) control the debate.
What Dr. Emanuel did was participate in the debate. (Successfully, for my money.)
It’s an extremely perverse argument to try to pillory a climate scientist for talking about the subject in which he is expert–hurricanes–and not commenting on subjects in which he is not–energy. In another context, I have no doubt that Bernhard would castigate Dr. Emanuel as unqualified, specifically for doing what he here demands Dr. Emanuel do.
And the criticism of “selective quotation” is just fatuous; any critique is going to be selective in the nature of things–unless the critiqued item got absolutely EVERYTHING wrong. (And probably even then, in the interest of economy.)
The purpose of the DOE report is support a change in the federal regulations governing the control of CO2, in particular it is alleging that there is scientific basis for the desired change. The U.S. regulatory system gives interested and affected members of the public to participate in the process. The scientific community, in particular working climate scientists, are taking this opportunity to point out the misinformation and provide scientific facts. Thanks to Kerry Emanuel, Real Climate, et al for this.
Also the CO2 Endangerment Finding is not “costing hundreds of billions and therefore impacting the welfare of all American citizens every day” because the regulations have not been finalized yet. Until a regulation is finalized it has no legal power and forces no costly changes.
*the DOE report is alleging there is no scientific basis for the desired change is what I meant to write. Oops.
Seems Dr. Gavin Schmidt already spotted your willful double-standard and your self-contradictory position:
“[Response: You posted two comments, one criticising Emanuel for not talking about energy use in a piece focused on science, and stating that climate scientists shouldn’t be in charge of policy, and then this one, faulting climate scientists for not making policy prescriptions (which you don’t want them to do anyway). Somewhat confused stance there… – gavin]”
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2025/09/climate-scientists-response-to-doe-report/#comment-838752
in Re to Atomsk’s Sanakan, 4 Sep 2025 at 8:17 AM,
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2025/09/critique-of-chapter-6-extreme-weather-in-the-doe-review/#comment-838854
Dear Sir,
It appears that you have no spotted the message confrming that “Bernhard” is merely a new camouflage of the well-known MultiTroll:
John Pollack says
2 Sep 2025 at 9:52 PM
Bernhard’s tone and lack of internal consistency seem quite similar to the recently banished trolls. And it seems the rest of us will have to keep on with “troll spotting” as a hobby.
[Response: Indeed. Also from a previously used IP. – gavin]
Best regards
Tomáš
P.S.
As you might have also missed my post of 29 Aug 2025 at 2:57 PM,
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2025/07/the-endangerment-of-the-endangerment-finding/#comment-838529
I would like to remind you of my plea expressed therein.
Specifically, as it appears from your post of 28 Aug 2025 at 1:38 PM,
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2025/07/the-endangerment-of-the-endangerment-finding/#comment-838493
that you know the answer to my question, I asked if you could tell me clearly whether the Earth climate sensitivity does depend on water availability for evaporation from the land, or does not.
It was a privilege to read Dr. Emanuel’s review. Thank you sir for this contribution to the review of this chapter of the CR. And thank you Real Climate for publishing it here.
While tropical systems warrant the attention they receive, I was personally appreciative that it was pointed out that the CR chapter didn’t discuss impacts/trends of straight line wind and hail damage resulting from individual severe thunderstorms and severe convective systems (definitely an issue in my part of the country).
From the summary: “They stress the finding that there are no statistically significant trends in, e.g., U.S. landfalling hurricane frequency, while not informing the reader that a) there was never a consensus prediction of such a trend and b) that plausible trends cannot be detected given the random noise and natural variability in the series.”
This a classic straw man argument. Attack climate science on the ground that “it predicts an increase in hurricane frequency, which the data does not show.” Ergo, climate science is wrong.
I have seen this particular point, or non-point, made before on climate science denier websites and in postings by science deniers; it is certainly not the first time it has appeared, and it won’t be the last: unless, of course, climate change does result in an uptick in the frequency as well as intensity of hurricanes, in which case the argument will be quietly dropped.
Extreme events by definition have very poor statistical characteristics for identifying short or even medium term rate changes. Plus examining only extreme events means you must throw away the vast majority of the data greatly reducing the power of any stats analysis to detect a true rate change even if one is occurring.
Both of these issues make using extreme events a wonderful tool for those interested in disseminating dis/misinformation.
One might as well judge a baseball pitcher’s worth by counting the number of no-hitters and perfect games they throw and throwing away all other performance data like ERA, etc.
jgnfld said:
If they are fat-tail events, true. Yet, consider mean sea-level measurements at various coastal sites around the world, see PSMSL. These are the residual extremes after all the daily (and annual) variations are factored out. Are these poorly characterized with respect to random statistical variation, or could they be further characterized as being deterministically predictable after factoring in nonlinear long-period lunar tidal cycles?
More likely the latter, as this comprehensive analysis reveals: https://pukpr.github.io/results/image_results.html
On top of that, the same model can be used to characterize ENSO and other climate indices that monitor extremes, see https://geoenergymath.com/2025/09/03/simpler-models-can-outperform-deep-learning-at-climate-prediction/
The caveat is that climate extremes differ from weather extremes.
fwiw, climate extremes, imho, are defined by a much longer timeframe (decades/centuries & longer). Clusters of weather extremes over time (what we are experiencing now) show a trend in climate extremity.
True. And not if one uses all single stations UNaggregated as a data source it is quite easy to see there are many more, for one example, hot records being set than cold records which directly implies that there is a warming trend underlying the system.
Yet how do our resident deniers report single stations? Well pretty much never except when one of the now rarer and rarer cold records is set. I seem to remember one of KIA’s posts just recently showing this exact propaganda tactic over a cold single reading at the South Pole.
“fwiw, climate extremes, imho, are defined by a much longer timeframe”
An El Nino event that can last a year or two is a climate extreme. It’s not a weather extreme because the El Nino will impact both the winter and summer, while weather is a description of conditions at a specific time.
As I stated, the sea-level extremes also have durations much longer than weather. This page shows the cross-validated evidence for a straightforward tidal model.
https://geoenergymath.com/2025/09/10/simpler-models-examples/
This research will eventuality lead to these climate extremes being highly predictable. As predictable as tidal charts. Look at the cross-validation results in the link above and argue that, not interested in any of this qualitative hand-wavy junk.
EXACTLY, In point of fact, both the central tendency (median, mean, mode) and the extreme value are poor indicators of a statistical distribution.
By the central limit theorem, distributions look normal near their mean, and at the extremes tend to be distributed according to Gumbel, Frechet or Weibull distributions depending on whether their tail converges to 0 exponentially, according to a power law (thick tail) or have a lower bound. The moments of the distribution tend to give a better description from which to determine the underlying distribution, but the moments higher than the variance tend to require large sample sizes.
Christopher Wright: ‘to critically review the current state of climate science, with a focus on how it relates to the United States”
It strikes me that this Trumpy ‘focus’ was designed to reinforce that significant part of the denialist movement that grudgingly partially accepts the science but denies any responsibility for protecting the climate of the rest of the world that isn’t America. In short, as long as the good ‘ol USA doesn’t come out too bad, it doesn’t matter if Bangladesh drowns or Europe/China/India suffers a lot
Minor quibble. Bangladesh is suffering because the land is sinking, not because of sea level rise. Nobody can be responsible for protecting the world from a changing climate.
Ken, a quibble about your quibble:
Bangladesh is currently affected by both land subsidence and sea level rise rates now and going forward. Also soil deposit rates now and into the future by the major rivers are also being factored by scientists.
Bottom line, it’s a dire picture already.
Ken Towe says “Nobody can be responsible for protecting the world from a changing climate.”
Yes, that’s been the status quo assumption–and it’s also transparently true that we can all choose not to take responsibility for it.
So, how’s that working out for us? From where I sit, not very well. We’ve lost hundreds of thousands of lives prematurely, suffered many more sub-fatal casualties unnecessarily, taken economic losses conservatively in the hundreds of billions USD, and are currently witnessing the destabilization of whole societies.
It would be much more useful to adopt as guiding principle the (also transparently true) axiom that we are all responsible for a changing climate and therefore if we wish to ameliorate it, we all share the responsibility to make it happen.
In short, that responsibility isn’t an onerous duty.
It’s an opportunity.
I find your comment… interesting. Weather kills thousands every year, down from hundreds of thousands in prior times. Climate change is real, harmful and needs to be addressed–more vigorously than we do at present. But AFAIK, climate change is not killing hundreds of thousands at all, let alone prematurely.
I know one of the international agencies published an estimate a decade or so ago claiming statistical inference of 150,000 total deaths due to climate change, an estimate that was immediately doubled in NGO publications. But no evidence was offered and their statistical calculations were, to be kind, a little suspect.
Human health is adversely affected by climate change in several developing countries and it would be blindness not to assume it has killed people there. But the numbers are quite low and poverty, hunger and political ineptness are a) far more to blame and b) mask the impacts of climate change.
To the extent that your claim has any validity at all (and it really doesn’t), it is a clarion call for more emphasis on adaptation, developing resiliency among affected populations, something I have long advocated. (Of course, anytime anyone call for more adaptation they are reviled as someone trying to change the focus from mitigation, something that is rarely true and is essentially trying to change the subject.)
I’m a progressive liberal agnostic, but this verse from the Christian bible does resonate with me: Matthew 25:35 “For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me.”
Yes. Continue with mitigation. Support carbon taxes, subsidies for renewables, continue to innovate on energy storage and carbon capture. Don’t take a penny away from those efforts. But feed the poor, house the homeless, provide succor to those fleeing their homelands for whatever reason (including present and future climate change.)
And don’t exaggerate the present effects of climate change. You then become the boy crying wolf. And there is a wolf. Unabated, climate change will take many more lives.
The “hundreds of thousands” is cumulative–I didn’t say annually–but also highly conservative. You get to that kind of number solely on heat wave mortality this century, and for events with significant statistical attribution to climate change. (In 2003, for instance, 70,000 heatwave deaths in Europe were attributed in significant part to anthropogenic climate change; the study below puts the current proportion of total heat mortality attributable to climate change at about 37%. If valid for 2003, that would give us over 20,000 deaths just in that one event.)
For a recent study of the risks, with an observational component, see:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-40599-x
“Overall, our results show that the potential for increased risks from heat-related mortality is not only a concern for the future, but something that has already manifested over the past two decades.”
The observational data in the study covers just 748 locations, and under-represents the most vulnerable regions because data collection doesn’t come cheap. It’s also not up-to-date, because assemblage of statistics and data quality control tends to be a slow process; I think only one location had data valid up to 2020. Yet even that limited sample documents over 130,000 deaths.
Moreover, direct heat-induced mortality is just one way in which climate change is killing.
There’s migration; per this report, over 70,000 people have died in migration from 2014-2024, with that number again being a known undercount (though how badly it’s undercounted, we don’t know). Climate change is not the only cause of migration, of course, but it is a significant driver.
https://www.iom.int/news/2024-deadliest-year-record-migrants-new-iom-data-reveals
There’s severe weather. There’s floods. There’s drought and its related food insecurity and famine. And very significantly, there’s tropical disease.
So, yes, my claim does indeed “have validity”–something you deny based on exactly no presented evidence whatever.
Turning to the mortality estimate you mentioned, I’m afraid that you seem to be confused on the topic. It was an independent study made by the World Health Organization in 2014, and projected (not estimated), 250,000 deaths annually (not 150,000) for 2030 through 2050 (not the present). A PDF is available here:
https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/134014/9789241507691_eng.pdf
The headline projection:
In other, plainer, words, it’s very likely to be an underestimate.
You say:
That is, to be charitable, wrong. The not-so-trifling monograph consists of 8 chapters and a tad over 100 pages; pp. 105-112 consist of the references used; at 20 or so references per page, that would be around 160 citations. In the scholarly world, that would be “evidence.” As to “their statistical calculations”, which you “kindly” describe as “a little suspect”, there are 6 subject chapters, as follows:
Ch. 2: Heat-related mortality
Ch. 3: Coastal flood mortality
Ch. 4: Diarrhoeal disease
Ch. 5: Malarial disease
Ch. 6: Dengue
Ch. 7: Undernutrition
Each one develops and applies its own statistical model, based on reported data as cited. (FWIW, I’m pretty sure each also had its own team of authors; the acknowledgments only name editors, and credit “an international consortium coordinated by the London School of
Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland), the University of Otago (New Zealand) and WHO.”) So, which of these chapters is “suspect”, exactly, and how?
Given that you got the headline facts about the report wrong, I must say that your airy dismissal of unspecified “statistical calculations” seems more than a little “sus” itself.
I’m glad that you advocate, as I do, feeding the hungry and so forth; and I’m glad that you take pains to support–though somewhat belatedly in your post–mitigation efforts, which are every bit as vital as you say, and more. But don’t accuse me of “crying wolf”; the wolf not only exists–it is here, as I’ve demonstrated above. And if we extend the metaphor just a bit, it’s fair to say also that more of the pack is on the way.
P. S. You don’t address my comments about economic losses, but while I’m supporting my claims, I might as well address that part of it briefly as well. Here’s a paper from 2023 in Nature Communications:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41888-1#Sec2
If that is accurate, my claim in the previous comment–which was deliberately extremely conservative, as I knew it to be based on very incomplete information–understated the case by a factor of up to 10x, depending upon how you interpret my “hundreds,” as 20 years at $143 bn/yr clearly gives us–or rather, has already taken from us–$2.86 trillion.
T Fuller: I find your comment “uninteresting”.
Mr. McKinney, I don’t believe the numbers back up your claim.
According to the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) studies (Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, IHME), heat-related deaths have risen modestly since the 1990s, primarily because of demographic changes (aging populations and growing urbanization) rather than climate change alone.
For example, a 2021 paper in The Lancet Planetary Health (Zhao et al., 2021) estimated that heat-related deaths increased by ~70% between 2000–2004 and 2017–2021, but emphasized that this increase is strongly linked to population aging and larger cities, where heat waves hit hardest.
Despite the rise in absolute numbers, heat-related deaths remain a very small fraction of global mortality — typically less than 0.5% of all annual deaths worldwide.
And at the very real risk of being accused of appropriating a skeptic talking point, I will remind you that cold-related deaths (from cardiovascular stress, respiratory illness, etc.) remain far higher. A 2015 study in The Lancet (Gasparrini et al.) analyzing 74 million deaths across 13 countries found that cold causes ~17 times more deaths than heat on average.
Most importantly (and now I’m wondering why I bothered writing the rest of this comment) A 2021 study in The Lancet Planetary Health (Zhao et al.) covering 2000–2019 found that globally, overall temperature-related deaths actually fell by about 150,000 per year, because reductions in cold deaths outweighed increases in heat deaths.
Heat waves kill. More global warming will mean that more people will die of heat related causes. Unless they get air conditioning in homes and offices and heat mitigation measures are adopted for agricultural workers. Spain, where I live, is actively searching to expand their Cold Centers, buildings in central spaces with air conditioning, open to the public during heat waves. Mostly libraries, malls and theaters, but with more on the way.
Hi Susan! I hope you are well. And as you find my comments uninteresting, I guess I hope you don’t see this.
Mr, McKinney, regarding your comments about the economic impacts of climate change, sorry if I had to take time to do some research. I actually don’t really disagree (much) with the Nature paper. (ChatGPT helped with this.)
Here are the headline findings and what the authors did:
The authors gathered data from Extreme Event Attribution (EEA) studies, which look at how much anthropogenic climate change has altered the probability or severity of specific extreme weather events.
They combined those attribution fractions with socio-economic costs (damage data, loss of life) of those events, from databases like EM-DAT.
They then extrapolated from the subset of events for which both attribution and cost data exist to estimate a global annual cost over the period 2000-2019. They conclude that about US$ 143 billion per year of extreme event costs (damage + loss of life) are attributable to climate change. Of that, 63% (~US$ 90 billion) is due to statistical value of life lost; the rest is economic damage.
The paper also suggests that many Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) likely underestimate these costs, particularly because IAMs tend to capture changes in average temperature but not the change in extreme tail events (e.g. very severe storms, heatwaves).
What the Paper Does Well
It provides a more immediate, event-based accounting than many IAMs:
Using EEA studies ties cost attribution more tightly to observed events (rather than hypothetical futures or damage functions that are calibrated on average temperature changes).
It explicitly separates direct damage + loss of life, rather than using only damage costs.
It is transparent about uncertainties: it notes the limited number of EEA studies, geographic and event-type coverage gaps, challenges in measuring indirect/flow losses (e.g. economic knock-on effects), and bias toward larger/wealthy countries with better data.
Here are where one must be cautious, especially if such numbers are used beyond the scientific context:
Data Coverage is Incomplete & Biased
Only 185 extreme events in their master dataset (2000-2019) have matching attribution & cost data. Many events still lack attribution studies, especially in low-income countries.
Nature
There’s geographic skew: more data from Europe, North America, parts of Asia; less from Africa, South America, etc. This can bias results toward events with better data and higher documentation.
Extrapolation from a Partial Sample
Because many events lack attribution work or full cost data, the global annual cost estimate relies on extrapolating from the subset of events with good data, assuming those are representative. That is a strong assumption.
Nature
Indirect losses (like long-term economic disruption, health impacts beyond mortality, mental health, damage to ecosystems) are mostly excluded, which means the US$ 143 billion is likely a lower bound of the costs.
Nature
“Value of Statistical Life” (VSL) Choices
The cost due to loss of life is calculated using a uniform VSL across countries (based on a US/UK average) rather than adjusting for local income, risk tolerance, or cultural differences. That makes the mortality component monetarily larger (or differently distributed) than some might believe is appropriate.
Nature
Attribution Fraction Uncertainty
Even within attribution studies, the Fraction of Attributable Risk (FAR) can vary depending on how you define the event (over how many days, what spatial scale, counterfactual baseline climate, etc.). That introduces uncertainty.
Nature
Temporal Limitations
Their period is 2000–2019. More recent years (post-2019) may have more extreme events, different costs, and higher attribution fractions. So any “today’s cost” claims based on this might under-represent current and near‐future risk.
Will you join me in a chorus of Kumbaya?
In the early 2000s, the World Health Organization (WHO) released an assessment estimating that climate change was already responsible for approximately 150,000 deaths per year. This number, widely cited at the time, quickly made its way into speeches, reports, and headlines. But what few people realized is that it was not based on direct evidence of actual deaths. Instead, it came from an attribution model — an attempt to estimate the portion of global health burdens (malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea, extreme weather events) that might reasonably be assigned to ongoing climate change.
The methodology was complex and heavily assumption-driven. Analysts started with observed disease burdens and disaster impacts, then used climate models to project how much of those might be worsened by anthropogenic warming. That slice was then converted into an annual mortality figure. WHO itself cautioned that the result was highly uncertain, offered only as a way of illustrating potential risks. Unfortunately, such caveats rarely survive the transition from technical reports to press releases.
By the end of the decade, the number had doubled. In 2009, the Global Humanitarian Forum (GHF), chaired by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, published a widely covered report that put the annual climate-related death toll at 300,000 people. The GHF’s methodology was opaque, and when pressed, its analysts could not provide peer-reviewed justification for the headline figure. Nevertheless, the number was repeated by advocacy groups, media outlets, and politicians as if it were an established fact.
Criticism followed. Public health specialists pointed out that malaria, malnutrition, and diarrheal disease have many causes, most of them more immediate than climate change. Assigning a portion of these deaths to global warming was speculative at best. Moreover, the risk of double counting was high, since the same climate factor could affect multiple overlapping causes. Perhaps most tellingly, no international body — not WHO, not the IPCC — has since attempted to update or systematize such mortality estimates. The absence of a consistent accounting effort strongly suggests that the methodological and political challenges were too great.
And of course style points will be awarded to the first commenter to label me a Lomborgian, Pielkeist, or even a Ridleyite.
Dragging credible impact estimates of future global warming into the present tarnishes the hard work of scientists.
Mr. McKinney, regarding climate-caused migration, your point would almost approach validity if you had emphasized that what little climate-caused migration exists, exists a) as internal, not cross-border migration and b) that labeling migration as a primary cause is speculative at best, grossly misleading at worst.
In 1990, the IPCC’s First Assessment Report mentioned the possibility of “up to 200 million displaced people by 2050” due to climate change. In 2020, about 281 million people were living outside their country of birth.
That’s about 3.6% of the world’s population. This number has grown steadily, but as a percentage of world population it’s been remarkably stable (around 3%–4%) for decades.
Estimates vary, but the annual international migration flow is roughly 30–40 million people per year.
NGOs and UN agencies have frequently repeated and amplified these figures (e.g., UNEP statements about “50 million climate refugees by 2010” — a forecast that quietly disappeared when it failed to materialize).
NGOs and lobbyists and the occasional blog commenter seem to have a vested interest in labeling migrants as climate refugees, even if they are actually fleeing a war or seeking better economic opportunity.
Climate change is real. We need to work harder to address it. There are people searching for more hospitable climates.
Neither heat deaths nor migration are mostly due to climate change–yet. Let’s work together to make sure neither gets worse.
This all reminds me of previous discussions about biodiversity. I argued at length with Jeff Harvey, an ecologist and often published scientist. He maintained that climate change was causing the Sixth Extinction, while I argued that habitat destruction, over hunting and over fishing, the introduction of alien species and pollution were actually the real threats to biodiversity. Eventually another commenter on Bart Verheggen’s weblog found a paper attributing about 1% of all extinctions to climate change. The argument switched to other subjects shortly thereafter.
Exaggeration is not helping those of us (including you!) that seek to combat human-caused climate change. Please stop.
Nick Palmer: – “In short, as long as the good ‘ol USA doesn’t come out too bad, it doesn’t matter if Bangladesh drowns or Europe/China/India suffers a lot”
In less than 50 years planet Earth could become largely unlivable.
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2025/08/critiques-of-the-critical-review/#comment-838751
I would not be at all surprised to see the rate of global mean sea level rise (SLR) accelerate further, from 5.9 mm/year in 2024 to 10 mm/year sometime in the 2030s, and double further to 20 mm/year before 2050. That likely equates to 40 to 50 cm of SLR relative to the year-2000 baseline by 2050, and multi-metre (i.e. ≥2 m) SLR before 2100. One metre of SLR would be catastrophic for many coastal cities, including in the US. I think 1 m of global mean SLR is plausible as early as in the 2060s.
https://coastal.climatecentral.org/map/6/-82.5961/29.397/?theme=water_level&map_type=water_level_above_mhhw&basemap=roadmap&contiguous=true&elevation_model=best_available&refresh=true&water_level=1.0&water_unit=m
The UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) published on 3 Nov 2023 the YouTube video titled An Intimate Conversation with Leading Climate Scientists To Discuss New Research on Global Warming, duration 1:12:23. From time interval 0:17:03, James Hansen said:
“The 1.5-degree limit is deader than a doornail, and the 2-degree limit can be rescued only with the help of purposeful actions to effect Earth’s Energy Balance. We will need to cool off Earth to save our coastlines, coastal cities worldwide, and lowlands, while also addressing the other problems caused by global warming.”
https://youtu.be/NXDWpBlPCY8?t=1023
Hansen also said:
“Yeah, the most important tipping point is the, the Antarctic ice sheet, and in particular the Thwaites ah, Glacier, which who’s grounding line has been moving inland at a rate of about a kilometre per year, and yeah, in another 20 years, it will reach a point where it, it… the, the um, bed ah, is so-called ah, retrograde bed, so it gets deeper. The Antarctic ice sheet sits on bedrock below sea level, but it gets deeper as you go towards the centre of the continent, and it gets… It hits a canyon in about 20-years if we continue at one kilometre ah, per year. When it hits that canyon, you’re going to get very rapid disintegration of that glacier, which is basically the cork that’s holding ah, a lot of the West Antarctic ice ah, in the bottle. So we don’t want to get there. And if we want to prevent, to slow down, and even stop the melting of the Antarctic ice sheet we have to cool off the planet. That’s, um… And, and we need to do that because, hah, more than half the large global cities in the world are on coastlines, and there are a lot of lowlands. Ah, so, that, that’s the tipping point which ah, I think dominates. But it so happens that there’s so many other ah, climate impacts that we would be getting to see and it would be much more if we go beyond two degrees, that there are many reasons to want to cool off the planet. If we want to keep a planet that looks more or less like the one that has existed the last ten thousand years, we actually have to cool off the planet back to a Holocene-level temperature, and that’s possible, but it’s not easy.”
https://youtu.be/NXDWpBlPCY8?t=3843
We/humanity are all in the same lifeboat (i.e. planet Earth) together. If we/humanity don’t all work together to change course (i.e. rapidly reduce our GHG emissions, remove some atmospheric carbon, cool down the planet similar to pre-industrial Holocene climate) then we all sink together (i.e. planet Earth becomes incompatible for human civilisation well before the end of this century). No one and no country is immune from this!
https://actuaries.org.uk/news-and-media-releases/news-articles/2025/jan/16-jan-25-planetary-solvency-finding-our-balance-with-nature/
the second comment on
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2025/05/predicted-arctic-sea-ice-trends-over-time/
by Williams stated about artic sea ice trends:
“”1. Where Is the Post-Mortem on CMIP3–5?
There is zero transparency in most public-facing articles about why CMIP3–5 failed so badly on sea ice. What specific physics, parameterizations, forcings, or feedbacks were missing or mishandled? Without a detailed diagnosis, how can we be sure CMIP6 isn’t just accidentally “right” — or worse, tuned to appear so?
Science is supposed to be about falsifiability and explanation. Yet there’s been no real accounting for how those older ensembles went so wrong, just vague talk of “improvements in resolution and physics.”
2. Improvement… or Post-Hoc Tuning?
The fact that CMIP6 now better aligns with observations after years of criticism about underestimation naturally raises the question: are models now being subtly calibrated or post-tuned to fit the observed data more closely? That’s not inherently unscientific, but it is problematic if:
— It’s not disclosed.
— It gives a false sense of predictive skill.
— It masks ongoing weaknesses within individual models.
“””
I think this provides a good starting point how Kerry Emanuel’s statements about models in this post need to be evaluated. The article has it all starting from Arrhenius intial theory and one dimensional models (both too incomplete to describe the real world in the neccesary detail) to the most advanced global models.
But given there are very significant differences between CMIP5 and CMIP6, it seems very obvious these models and theories are not ready yet to provide helpful information isntead of options expressed in comouter code, when comes trends about huricanes impacting the US.
=> To take his opinion serious the points made by William needs to be adrressed
Once excluding potentially faulty models, Kerry seems to aggree quite well with the DOE that there is just not enough real world data to make strong statements about alarming trends for huricanes in the US and
“”process-based understanding and simple thermodynamic arguments have been invoked to assert that warming is worsening extreme weather events. However, it is naïve to assume that any recent extreme
event is caused by human influences on the climate.””
seems spot on!
YK: “The fact that CMIP6 now better aligns with observations after years of criticism about underestimation naturally raises the question: are models now being subtly calibrated or post-tuned to fit the observed data more closely?”
Only among the uninformed.
>> RL:Only among the uninformed
>> AS: you’ll misrepresent accurate model forecasts as instead being hindcasts / backcasts,
Uh.. G. Schmidt wrote the post about hind casting different models and I cited William comment there.
You seem to have trouble to even understand whom you are criticizing and what they were posting about.
>> just to avoid admitting models are accurate
I agree that the accuracy of GCM is not up for debates!
It’s there for all to see in Schmidt’s post from last month as the uncertainty of his assemble means for March artic sea ice trends allows any development from increased sea ice to triple the observed rate.. William’s questions are very justified and also apply to E. Kerry’s post here making statements about using models to predict US hurricane trends when measured data is very unclear.
The fact that CMIP6 results are significantly different than older models seems also well established. Look for example at Rahmstorf’s post here a few months back, where he advocated to stick with the older models with lower resolution and wrong cloud micro-physics, because the better models did not reproduce his alarming numbers.
(Besides his uh interesting choice of doing what he claims is climate science, the model improvements are there and have an effect, which necessarily means older models were wrong! Arguing this fact seems ingredibly silly..)
You’re still misrepresenting forecasts as being hindcasts/backcasts, so that you can avoid admitting models made accurate forecasts. You’re not fooling any sensible and informed person.
The modeled projections were made for future trends, and subsequently observed trends matched those projections. It’s not a matter of models retrodicting (or postdicting) past observed trends.
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2025/07/the-endangerment-of-the-endangerment-finding/#comment-837371
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-gdabZooKo&t=2594s&pp=2AGiFJACAcoFF3Byb2Zlc3NvciBkYXZlIGV4cGxhaW5z
https://x.com/AndrewDessler/status/1963782119383069016
>> models made accurate forecasts
Which ones? CMIP6 or the older ones? G. Schmidt showed they have different outputs and as a consequence of that Wiliam’s questions are quite justified and still lacking good answers.
A bunch of 4 year olds can scribble lines on a diagram making “forcasts” too, they are about as meaningless as bad models.
Ray Ladbury “Only among the uninformed”
David “William’s poorly defined and unsupported position”
>> These posts speak for themselves!
And there is Atomsk’s Sanakan seemingly saying there is no problem with models
(in response to a post by G. Schmidt clearly showing differences between CMIP6 and odler models and huge confidence bands regarding the artic sea ice situation and projections)
I merly suggested that the very obvious problems for these models with the artic sea ice might equally apply to E. Kerry’s post here about US hurricanes, where the data seems scare.
If even only potentially so, E. Kerry’s post becomes very thin!
The posts far seem non-responive.
You were given links to sources on the models, including modeled projections published in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, CMIP3, CMIP5, etc. Not my fault you refuse to engage with any of the evidence showing your denialism is wrong.
It’s a fact that modeled projections accurately forecasted warming, as reflected in the modeling being consistent with observations of implied TCR. You’ve dodged that by misrepresenting forecasts as being backcasts/hindcasts, engaging in the nirvana fallacy where you incorrectly act like this is a question of whether models are perfect, etc.
Re: “A bunch of 4 year olds can scribble lines on a diagram making “forcasts” too, they are about as meaningless as bad models.”
Yet the DoE report authors failed to make accurate forecasts. And your bias is showing again: you claim models don’t make accurate forecasts, and when repeatedly shown they do make such forecasts, you claim that doesn’t matter. A clear sign of someone who’ll just say whatever they deem necessary to suit their predetermined opposition to models.
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2025/07/the-endangerment-of-the-endangerment-finding/#comment-836838
For context, folks should know that you don’t accurately represent models. For example, you’ll misrepresent accurate model forecasts as instead being hindcasts / backcasts, just to avoid admitting models are accurate. Otherwise, you’d have to deal with evidence that’s inconvenient for your pre-determined narrative on tuning. And you tone troll to avoid evidence.
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2025/07/the-endangerment-of-the-endangerment-finding/#comment-837371
Fantastic! Everything about your sentence
“Not my fault you refuse to engage with any of the evidence showing your denialism is wrong.”
Is wrong for this debate!
You should not insult people and blame is irrelevant, may I suggest a strong focus in the current topic and just the facts?
Since your answers keep repeating irrelevant things (models outputs are tested to backwards trends and reasonable forecasts – RCP8.5s clearly failing that 2nd criteria did not stop them from being wildly used – and as an example why this alone is quite meaningless scribblings if 4-year olds in a timeline could pass these tests, they do not provide prove if skill!)
You seem to miss understand my writings which might be my fault.
So here is a very basic question:
If the CMIP6 tests revealed, that the -back then- latest improvements to the models resolution and cloud micro-physics significantly changed their output and projections, would that mean that projections based on models without those improvements are lacking? (For which I consequently call them being wrong)
And you’re back to tone trolling, misrepresenting accurate model forecasts as instead being hindcasts/backcasts, etc. Sorry, but you’re still not going to get away with it. My responses are not for your benefit anyway, since you never cogently address substance and evidence. They’re for the folks you’re trying to disinform.
Again: modeled projections accurately forecasted warming, as reflected in the modeling being consistent with observations of implied TCR. That’s been true since before the IPCC’s 1990 First Assessment Report (FAR). No amount of evasion from you changes this.
Even contrarians like Roger Pielke Jr. now admit this.
If this was so easy that “quite meaningless scribblings if 4-year olds in a timeline could pass these tests“, then it’s ironic that the CWG members failed this test. So by that logic, the CWG members are less credible than 4-year-olds.
And you were already rebutted on your point regarding model skill, which you incoherently state as “they do not provide prove if skill!“. You never address that rebuttal because you focus more on tone trolling than on substance.
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2025/07/the-endangerment-of-the-endangerment-finding/#comment-837371
You have not read nor understood the paper cited to you there. The paper calculates skill scores for the modeled projections. It can do that since the models project implied TCR in virtue of projecting future forcing and future surface warming. That implied TCR can then be compared to subsequently observed trends, along with a null hypothesis, to generate a skill score. That’s shown in table 1 of the paper:
The most you’ve managed is baselessly claiming that the paper’s authors engaged in fraud, including Dr. Gavin Schmidt and Dr. Zeke Hausfather. This despite the fact that their conclusion was supported by other research. That ‘fraud’ accusation shows the kind of person you are, for all your tone trolling.
Atomsk: “responses are not for [X’s] benefit anyway, since [X] never cogently address substance and evidence. They’re for the folks [X is] trying to disinform.” [where ‘X” is demonstrably off base, on purpose or mistakenly, &/or courting an audience]
Exactly!
Hi Yebo. The following portions of your comment only makes sense if you have already accepted William’s poorly defined and unsupported position (as he repeatedly presented here in June & July) as your starting point:
“I think this provides a good starting point how Kerry Emanuel’s statements about models in this post need to be evaluated.” (…)
And
“Once excluding potentially faulty models”… (…)
Is that correct?
Never mind. No need wasting your time replying to my question Yebo. I can now see your Sept. 6 10:52am comment replying to Ray. I understand all I need to know.
And
>> William’s poorly defined and unsupported position
being that he seems to have valid and so far completely unanswered questions about the very visible differences between CMIP6 and older models in G. Schmidt’s sea ice post!?
Would you care to elaborate carefully what exactly is “poorly defined and unsupported” there?
The only possible argument I could possibly see here is that the model results might be largely uncertain about artic sea ice trends, but somehow fare much better for US hurricanes, where even the measured data is weaker. Is that your line of reasoning?
No.
No.
I hope Gavin will check if Yebo Kando is one of the multitroll nexus …
If not, he’s using AI to distract and deny just like they do.
Having long known Kerry and followed his work, I’m disturbed by the widening gap between front and editorial page accounts not just of hurricanes but disasters in general. Two decades ago I wrote on geophysics behind in the news with some frequency for the WSJ, covering events as lethal as the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami and Pakistan’s 2006 earthquake.
While the Ed Board greeted tectonic disasters with scarcely concealed journalistic glee- it didn’t take much dimensional analysis to sort out the ones that looked truly headline making, things took an altogether different turn in 2005. Forewarned by Kerry’s work on hurricane thermodynamics, and informed by seeing the epochal death toll Oscar left behind a few years earlier, I automatically took interest as then -tropical storm Katrina’s trajectory veered towards Louisiana, because the Gulf of Mexico Gulf Stream eddy SST was lit up to 90º F.
After watching the storm rev up on screen til close to midnight I decided to do the Editor the favor of rudely awakening him to a pending scoop, flatly telling him that as New Orleans could go glug-glug in 48 hours, he might want to put some writer on the case. Instead, he hung up in indignation , because climate models & Al Gore, and it slowly dawned on me that Dow Jones was not what it used to be.
Thank you Russell. This personal fact-based account is revelatory. I, from completely different point of view, had a similar experience of reality breaking in while lies prevailed. One more data point on why I continue to want to see what you have to say.
Piotr @5 Sep 2025 at 12:05 PM
Nigel: Piotr, I think you have misinterpreted Bernard”.”
Piotr: Nigel, I am not sure how. How is his: “ No matter the opinion of Kerry Emanuel, the IPCC or modelling climate scientists they have no Authority to dictate Public Policy or to control the debate.
anything else BUT a wide accusation of climate scientists of usurping the right to dictate “Public Policy” and to silence the opposing voices???
Nigel: Yes in hindsight I can see how you would interpret Bernard that way. I will take back my suggestion you misinterpreted him
Piotr: “An accusation made even more absurd, by the fact that it is Bernhard’s side – the Project 2025 ideologues and Trump, who have both the will and the power to take over EPA, DOE, NASA, to use it to degrade climate science, and fire or threaten scientists into silence, after which they can “dictate Public Policy” informed not by the best science, but by their MAGA anti-science and anti-environment ideology, and the fossil fuel lobby interests that support them.”
Nigel: Yes exactly right, but this should be a clue that Bernard is not on the side of MAGA. That was my point. I had assumed you realised Bernard is just another identity of the multitroll character (according to Gavins post). I just dont think Bernard is attacking science and scientists as a MAGA anthropogenic science denier. Instead as per my previous comments ‘Bernard” attacks scientists because they largely don’t promote his preferred solutions like de-industrialisation. . And also because they are dismissive of Hansens extreme theories. Multi troll is a big Hansen supporter. You are presumably aware of his rhetoric.
Multi troll / Bernard is “a third side” of the climate debate: the left wing concern troll although they end up making themselves look like denialists. Multitroll / Bernard is some sort of hard leftist and he’s skeptical of renewables because they perpetuate the capitalist growth machine. Has written comments on this.
Nigel “ I had assumed you realised Bernard is just another identity of the multitroll character
I had. In fact my whole point is that if one removed the author, one could NOT tell whether the words:
“ No matter the opinion of Kerry Emanuel, the IPCC or modelling climate scientists they have no Authority to dictate Public Policy or to control the debate.”
were written by a doomist, or a trumpist . – DOE spokesperson or somebody from Project 2025.
You can’t tell these two aparat neither by the target of the attacks (climate science) nor by rhetorical style employed (accusing climate scientists for usurping the right to dictate “Public Policy” and to silence the opposing voices) ”
As the French say – ‘Les extrèmes se touchent’ – both Project 2025 and doomists are fundamentalists, who reject the real-life good for the ideological perfect, for whom either you are unreservedly with them, or you are against them, and who are united in their hatred of the middle: fro them those who share only some of their position, are TRAITORS of the Case and as such for them WORSE than those who have been against from the beginning. It’s nothing new:
– that’s why Christian anti-Semites persecuted Jews, with whom they share God and the old Testament, often more viciously than pagans or other believers – in their eyes Jews had a chance to go with Jesus and they rejected thus making them worse who never faced that choice
-that’s why in Islamistic countries a life-long Christian may be tolerated, while a Muslim who converted to Christianity deserves putting to death
– that’s why the stalinists during the Spain civil war went after the non-stalinist socialists, anarchists, and other groups, with as much, if not more, zeal as they went after the fascists
– that’s why NKVD helped Gestapo informing them on the Polish resistance not only in 1939-1941 period of honeymoon following the joint Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland, but also after 1941 when they were already in war with Nazis and as such – were supposed to be on the same side as the Polish underground.
And that’s why the doomists, in their attacks on the climate science – are defended and supported by the deniers (e.g. Ken Towe: “Bernard has yet to reply. But I already stated that ….” or KIA complimenting KJV and using his post a springboard to praise fossil fuels and expanding on KVJ’s critique of carbon tax)
– and vice versa – KVJ repeating the old denier trope that carbon taxes place the most of the burden on the low income people), or Multitroll, disparaging, hand in hand with deniers, renewables, or commiserating with the deniers – on how they will never get a fair hearing from the climate scientists.
That’s why the strange bedfellows, doomers and deniers, are not really that “strange”, if anything – their sharing the bed borders on a psychological/sociological cliche.
And that’s why the motivations of “Bernhard”, whether he is really concerned about the future, or just a troll for whom the subject matter doesn’t matter because he just gets high on the feeling that he is able to dominate a discussion, and therefore “owns” the people posting here, do not really matter.
By their fruits you shall know them.
Kerry Emanuel voted Republican from 1973 to 2012, when he changed his voter registration to Independent. At the time, he said (cs3.mit.edu/about-us/personnel/emanuel-kerry/news-media?page=3):
“[Newt] Gingrich and [Mitt] Romney understood, … and I think they even believed the evidence and understood the risk,” Emanuel says. “But they were so terrified by the extremists in their party that in the primaries they felt compelled to deny it. Which is not good leadership, good integrity. I got a low impression of them as leaders.” Throughout the Republican presidential primaries, every candidate but one—former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, who was knocked out of the race at the start—questioned, denied, or outright mocked the science of climate change.
Soon after his experience in South Carolina, Emanuel changed his lifelong Republican Party registration to independent. “The idea that you could look a huge amount of evidence straight in the face and, for purely ideological reasons, deny it, is anathema to me,” he says.
Thank you, Dr. Emanuel, for your commitment to following the science where it leads, regardless of ideology:
Ideology = Motivated Cognition – Jerry Taylor (niskanencenter.org/the-alternative-to-ideology)