Call it the calamity of climate journalism. After 40 years, writers are still serving up a binary issue, with idiotic back-and-forths over who is a denier in ways that work, sometimes deliberately, to undermine clear thinking and any concession to the changing science.
Better can be done and last weekend a newish New York Times writer,
David Wallace-Wells,
in his customary excess of words, reprised his own concession since writing a 2017 New York Magazine article titled “The Uninhabitable Earth.” He now says: “Just a few years ago climate projections for this century looked quite apocalyptic.” He acknowledges a new consensus that had reduced expected warming to “between two and three degrees” Celsius, or less than half the forecast of, say, the 2018 U.S. National Climate Assessment.
If the name Wallace-Wells is familiar, almost three years ago, when he was writing for a different publication, this column welcomed him aboard the successful effort to junk a worst-case emissions forecast, known as RCP 8.5, that everywhere was presented as the objective climate future. Now I can offer concessions of my own. I once complained the term RCP 8.5 never appeared in the Times’s print edition. Now it has. I said it might be five years before the paper recognized the less-dire warming consensus. It’s been less than two.
One of my snarks still holds up, though. I said when the predicted climate catastrophe fails to materialize, activists would credit themselves. Mr. Wallace-Wells attributes half of the improved picture to abandonment of the faulty RCP 8.5 and half to technological advance, but this is problematic at the very least. Technological advance is usually assumed. A quirk of RCP 8.5 was that it specified stagnating technology except, strangely, for the technology to allow a sextupling of global coal consumption.
He also leaves out a second reason that, again, has nothing to do with climate activists and everything to do with science correcting its errors. The consensus-bearing U.N. climate panel, after 40 years, modified its all-important “climate sensitivity” estimate, using real-world temperature trends to corral its discordant and unreliable computer simulations. Result: lower expected warming and lower estimated risk of worst-case warming.
All of this is so completely the opposite of new or news that you can only roll your eyes, but at least…
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