This is waaaaaaaaay too many words when all they want to say is “RCP8.5 is now unrealistic given progress towards climate goals, and the “business as usual” scenario should be updated in the next IPCC report”
And before anyone says so, no it has nothing to do with the supposed lessened attention span smartphones have caused. I'm not wasting 15 minutes of my life reading about social media recommendation algorithms [1] when not even a single paragraph is dedicated to at least some rudimentary technical explanation behind them.
Same goes for 30-minute YouTube videos attempting to maximize monetization for subjects whose explanation in less than 10 minutes for an average intelligence person is adequate.
Here's also a recent example of ideal, imo, technical writing that is sadly getting more scarce:
Recipes tell you how their great grandmother moved to the Americas and made the first apple pie ever. And then detail the entire history of apples and how to make the entire recipe. And then, 70% of the way down the page, right before the comment section, is what you wanted at first glance: what’s in this pie, and how long will it take me to make?
It’s everywhere.
Why?
What point are you actually trying to make? It seems like you’re trying to equate one with the other, especially given your novel use of the word “denialism”. I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but I’m still unclear on what exactly you are implying.
Roger A. Pielke Jr. is an American political scientist and professor, and was the director of the Sports Governance Center within the Department of Athletics at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado Boulder.
He got that from his father who was also an AGW denialist (a climate change believer, but a denier that humans play any meaningful role), albeit one with more relevant credentuals:
Roger A. Pielke Sr. is an American meteorologist with interests in climate variability and climate change, environmental vulnerability, numerical modeling, atmospheric dynamics, land/ocean – atmosphere interactions, and large eddy/turbulent boundary layer modeling.
I agree, so I used ChatGPT to summarize this for us:
In the article "Climate Change Scenarios Have Lost Touch with Reality," written by Roger Pielke Jr. and Justin Ritchie and published in Issues in Science and Technology, the authors argue that the climate change scenarios used by policymakers and scientists have become disconnected from empirical reality. They suggest that this has led to an overreliance on untested and unrealistic assumptions, which in turn undermines the credibility of climate change projections and makes it more difficult to develop effective policies.
The authors note that climate change projections are typically based on a set of assumptions about future greenhouse gas emissions, which are then used to generate a range of potential climate outcomes. However, these assumptions often fail to account for a range of important factors, such as economic growth, technological innovation, and changes in land use patterns, which can have a significant impact on emissions and climate outcomes.
Pielke and Ritchie argue that policymakers and scientists need to take a more pragmatic and evidence-based approach to climate change projections, one that is grounded in real-world data and incorporates a wider range of factors. They suggest that this could involve developing more diverse and flexible scenarios that are better able to capture the complexity and uncertainty of the real world.
Overall, the authors stress the importance of ensuring that climate change policies are based on realistic and evidence-based projections, rather than relying on overly simplistic or unrealistic assumptions. They argue that this will require a fundamental rethinking of the way that climate change scenarios are developed and used, and a greater emphasis on collaboration and dialogue between policymakers, scientists, and other stakeholders.
edit: it's not due to any antipathy to AI. I love using ChatGPT myself.