RCP8.5 asks: why can't we just get along?
RCP8.5 asks: why can't we just get along?
RCP8.5 may not be business as usual, but there are still good reasons to use it
Letter I received in the mail the other day. Reprinted with permission. — AED
Dear haters:
It’s me, RCP8.5, your frenemy emissions scenario.
For the looky-loos out there who don’t know me, let me introduce myself. I am an emissions scenario. If you want to predict the future climate, you need me because I am an estimate of how much greenhouse gases human society will emit. Plug me into a climate model and I can tell you what the future climate will be.
But predicting the future is hard. Because of this, the community of experts does not make a single prediction of how the future will evolve. Rather, I am one of a family of alternative scenarios my siblings and I are expected to span the range of plausible futures the world may experience over the next century or two.
I was developed in the 2000s, when coal was ascendant and you often saw headlines like this:
This is the world of RCP8.5 — my world, bitches. It’s a world where atmospheric carbon dioxide is over 900 ppm in 2100 and reaches six times pre-industrial values by 2200:
Because of the huge warming caused by this much carbon dioxide, I would be an absolute nightmare to humanity.
But that was then. Today, things have changed. Hydraulic fracturing (fracking) produced a tidal wave of cheap natural gas, which produces less carbon dioxide when converted to electricity.
And zero-emission energy sources like wind and solar have plummeted in price to the point where they are also much cheaper than coal. As a result, coal has been on the decline.
At this point, it’s very unlikely that the world ends up with RCP8.5-levels of warming in 2100 (its pretty much impossible in RCP4.5 and quite unlikely in RCP6.0).
A lot of the deserved criticism of me comes when the media focuses on RCP8.5 impacts within this century, or when a subset of scientists still refer to me as business as usual. But the criticism can be taken too far. While it’s unlikely that our climate will hit the warming levels predicted by RCP8.5 by the year 2100, it's entirely plausible the climate could reach those levels in 2150 or 2200.
Forced vs. Unforced Climate Response
But the truth is that great emissions scenarios like me are always relevant and there are good reasons to continue using me in scientific analyses.
Many important questions in climate science require separating forced and unforced climate responses. A forced response is caused by external imposition of an energy imbalance on the Earth, which then leads to climate change. Examples of this include:
adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere
a volcano spewing sulfur into the atmosphere, which forms aerosols that reflect sunlight back to space
the Sun getting brighter
In contrast, unforced variability arises naturally in the models from the complex, dynamic, and non-linear processes in the Earth's climate system. These processes cause climate fluctuations, even in the absence of forcing. The best example of this is the El Nino-La Nina cycle, but there’s a veritable zoo of unforced climate variations out there, such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the North Atlantic Oscillation, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, etc.
These unforced variations add to the forced, long-term trend, yielding the observed global time series of temperatures. The plot below shows the global satellite temperature record. The red segments are El Nino periods, during which the globe rapidly warms. The blue segments are La Nina periods, during which the globe cools.
The ups and downs from the El Nino-La Nina cycle are superimposed on top of the long-term (forced) trend (the green arrow) to produce the observed record.
Climate models, like those used by the IPCC, simulate both forced and unforced components of climate change. The forced changes mainly comes from the addition of greenhouse gases to the model’s atmosphere; how much gets added is determined by which emissions scenario is used.
Unforced variability arises organically from the physics of the model’s coupled atmosphere-ocean system.
The response of the climate system to these two categories of climate change may not be the same. Is the response of summertime heat extremes over North America, for example, different for global warming due to carbon dioxide vs. climate change from an El Nino? We can use climate models to help us understand this.
This is where the scenario makes a difference. If you use a sissy scenario, like RCP2.6, then the magnitude of the forced and unforced climate change are comparable and you won’t be able to tell if the simulated response is due to the forced or unforced components.
But if you use a manly scenario like me, the forced climate change dwarfs the unforced climate variability, so the response of the climate system is mostly due to forcing.
Other uses of RCP8.5
Another big advantage of me, RCP8.5, is that virtually every modelling group has run their model with me. Although I may not represent a particularly likely future pathway, the wealth of information generated from these simulations can still be usefully employed if researchers frame the results in an appropriate manner.
For example, this figure from a paper written by Dessler’s graduate students, Jangho Lee and Jeff Mast, shows output from a run where carbon dioxide increases at 1% per year, an even higher level of emissions than RCP8.5. In this plot, they show the results (number of deadly days and tropical nights in six different regions) as a function of global average temperature.
Plotted this way, the results are largely scenario-independent because the relationship between climate variables and global temperature rise is expected to be mostly consistent across different emissions scenarios. This approach makes the information derived from the RCP8.5 simulations relevant and valuable for climate change assessments and adaptation strategies.
The researchers could, of course, have made a similar plot with a lower-emissions scenario, like RCP4.5. But the lower amount of warming in that scenario means the plot would top out around 3°C, so you not be able to infer what happens at higher levels of warming. Advantage RCP8.5.
Cancel culture
Despite the efforts of some to cancel me, I will never stop being a legitimate and valuable tool for understanding our climate system. Modelers will continue to use me to characterize the forced response of the climate system. And by plotting my projections against global average temperatures, I enable researchers to better understand the complex dynamics of the climate system at high levels of warming. This will help climate science inform effective policies and strategies.
Yours truly,
Here's a highly objectionable little nugget you snuck in there: "But that was then. Today, things have changed. Hydraulic fracturing (fracking) produced a tidal wave of cheap natural gas, which produces less carbon dioxide when converted to electricity." --> Are you literally being funded by Chesapeake Energy?!
This intentionally ignores the impact of methane leaked directly into the atmosphere by natural gas operations. Such methane is not being measured or monitored by the industry or government, so we truly have no idea how much there is, but citizens with infrared cameras document huge plumes of the stuff. Since they're not being measured, they're not ending up in your models. That doesn't mean that they don't exist. As the other commenter on this post points out, your models are underestimating warming by a huge amount. All these models and scenarios are tools of political obfuscation and mendacity.
But more to the point is what the fracking boom has done, politically. It caused the war in Ukraine, which resulted in the biggest single methane release in human history when the Nord Stream pipeline was blown up by the CIA. Here's how the Fracking boom caused Ukraine:
Consider the orchestration of events in 2022. Remember, as you do so, the history that orchestrated those events: the coup in the Maidan, but earlier than that, the fracking boom in America that briefly transformed the landscape of the midwest into man-camps. This turned out to be the worst petroinvestment in recent history; frackers were losing money on every unit sold. The energy section of the Stock Market became a toxic swamp of cons as dollars turned into costly objects that produced oil at a capital loss. It was a perpetual moneyhole during years when the rest of the Market was delivering big returns on the beloved FAANGS. And yet, money kept going down the moneyhole. The big guys don’t pull their money out of an investment that goes down. Rather, they intervene in the material world to turn the bet around, at least to the point where they can exit the position without embarrassing losses. The $5.4 billion that Cheniere used to build the first LNG export terminal at Sabine Pass came from people who expected that money back. The problem was, the economics made no sense at the energy prices of the day. The price of natural gas had crashed with everything else in 2008, but had never recovered as frackers like Chesapeake Energy (ticker: CHK) swamped the market with product that couldn’t really be stored or stockpiled. They had cracked the earth and the methane was spurting out; not a process over which the human agents have all that much control. For one thing, it could only be transported via pipeline. Since it is so voluminous, tanks don’t make economic sense. Therefore, unlike oil, it could only be sold in places continentally contiguous to its source. The gas market in Europe faced towards the East; the Nord Stream 1 had been online since 2011; many things America wants to control, but can’t. Chesapeake could only sell to North and South America, and they had crashed those markets with a massive influx in product, the result of a fun-sounding process of underground liquid sandbombs that destabilized the very earth to shake free the methane within. They lost more money with each cubic-foot they pumped out, and yet they could not stop. They desperately needed to reach the Asian and European markets. And not only reach, but control over, because fracking was already more expensive than conventional methane extraction, and squeezing it into a liquid only added expense. So they needed to sell it, but they needed to sell it in a market that could support much higher prices. They needed a war.
February of 2012, Blackstone and other partners committed $5.4 billion in debt financing to Cheniere Energy (Stock ticker: LNG) to build the Sabine Pass LNG export terminal. An asset that could become a liability unless Russia was shut out of the European gas market by the time the product came online, projected to be in 2016. Maidan in 2014 was just on time.
The first thing to say is that there is a huge population of Russian-speaking Ukranians. The borders have shifted and dissolved many times around people who are culturally and linguistically Russian, as opposed to those who speak Ukrainian. However inconvenient it may be for those who want war, those people exist and were being treated as second-class citizens.
Much has been written but too little read about the 2014 Maidan coup. I urge you to remember back at the time, we were keenly aware that the protestors and then the new government included Banderite fascists. Though many now profess ignorance. It looks like a textbook post-gladio operation, the type which is frequently attempted but that rarely works, except when they do. It’s been proven that the massacre at the Maidan was perpetrated by the protesters on their own unwitting numbers, and it is the post-coup government was more virulently anti-Russian than any since the end of the Soviet Union. The first act of the Poroshenko government involved marginalizing the Russian language from public spaces. If the function of a machine is its result, the function of the Maidan operation was to put everyone on a war footing, a position from which the state department leveraged more and more pressure against Russia by scheduling the inclusion of the Kiev government in NATO. If you don’t understand why that was a red line for the Russians, you need to read more history.
Sabine Pass was an export terminal without a corresponding import terminal anywhere in the world. The investors were content to play con games with the debt from Sabine Pass, but paled at the prospect of funding anything else before the cash started to flow.
When Zelensky was elected in 2019, it looked like it could get in the way of the war planning. He was elected as the peace candidate, who spoke Russian and was Jewish. It’s unclear what the Americans did to him to get him to fully commit to this, but they got him where they wanted, and finally in 2022, America gave Russia the final ultimatum: Invade Ukraine, or we’ll include it in NATO. That happened to be Putin’s red line – whatever his red line happened to be, the US would have threatened to cross it in January 2022. We wanted the war, which is exactly why we are told with such vehemence that the war is unprovoked.
Once war started just in time to cancel Nord Stream 2, deals are made fast. The European people were threatened with a cold winter of gas shortages, and so they let the EU arrange a massive public investment in LNG. Immediately, shipments that had been going to China were diverted to Europe. As was the desired outcome, Russian exports to the EU dropped by 56% and American LNG imports to the EU jumped from 2,585 million cubic metres per month to 4,562. All out of existing LNG infrastructure: Sabine Pass in Louisiana to export, Dunkirk to import. Even during that time, these facilities were being utilized at a maximum of ~80% of capacity, a peak which went down quickly. In 2022 the UK, Switzerland, France, Germany, Norway, and Portugal signed 17 long-term contracts—15 or 20 years—to buy billions of cubic meters per year, from brand-new plants. By March 2023, there were nine export terminals operating, and three more under construction, including the massive Plaquemines facility, which is visible to the naked eye from space.
From now on, LNG stands for “Leaky Natural Gas.” It is impossible to know how leaky all this infrastructure is. It could all very well be spewing vast amounts of methane into the air at every transition-point. We don’t know how much, and we don’t want to know. The input gas leaks from every pore on its way into the factory, and also it frequently explodes. Once it is liquid, it must be kept at -162ᵒC or else it evaporates (your freezer keeps stuff at -18ᵒC). An energy-intensive proposition, especially sailing across the Atlantic in unprecedented heat. One assumes that every time the tank accidentally warms up, from a power failure or just a cost-saving measure on the open sea, they outgas the evaporated methane. That could be a little, or it could be a lot, and we will likely never know.
Remember that methane retains a lot more heat than CO2. The Gotta Hear Both Sides is that it does degrade into component molecules over time. But the next ten to twenty years of warming are the ones that worry me the most. By the end of what’s coming, it may not really matter anymore.
A second point concerning the validity of models.
You have a LOT more faith in them than I do. There are so many flaws in our current models that are artifacts of how our understanding of the Climate System has evolved over time. The main thing to understand is that they are underestimating the warming effect of CO2 by about 40%.
There are huge amounts of evidence indicating this is the case.
1. The Paleoclimate data for the last 23 million years indicates this. The last time CO2 levels were this high the global mean temperature was 4C warmer than our 1950-1980 baseline. Not 1.5C, 4C.
2. How hot do you think it is now? The "observed" temperature is 1.3C over the baseline. But, we now know that as much as 0.9C of warming has been hidden by anthropogenic particulates in the atmosphere. IE, it's really about 40% hotter than we feel. If we stop acting like a "Pinatubo" and putting massive amounts of SOx particulate into the air via diesel fuels, our planet will RAPIDLY warm.
BTW this is happening"right now".
In 2020 the World Maritime Organization mandated a reduction of sulfur in all marine diesel fuels globally. From 3.5% to 0.5%. This will prevent 22 million deaths from air pollution each year. It is also causing a massive drop in SOx levels in the atmosphere as these particulates wash out of the air in about 3-5 years (see Pinatubo eruption effect).
This is a big reason this El Nino is going to be a world shaking monster. We are about to get a lot of the warming that's been masked. We are about to find out how much our models (dominated by the Moderate Faction in Climate Science) were off.