The report was reviewed by various people with expertise in various different aspects of climate change. The reviewers are pasted at the bottom of this comment.
The criticism raised by GIdeon seems to be that it doesn’t cite some studies that take an extreme stance on climate risk relative to mainstream climate scientists and climate economists. I discuss many of the claims made in these papers at considerable length. If you disagree with some of my substantive claims, then I would be happy to discuss them.
I don’t think my report is outside the mainstream of IPCC science. I can’t think of any substantive claims that are inconsistent with the latest IPCC report, with the exception of my criticism of the Burke et al (2015) paper and the ecosystem collapse stuff.
The reviewers for the report are below, though they may not agree with everything I have written.
Matthew Huber, Professor, Dept. of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, Purdue University
Dan Lunt, Professor of Climate Science, Bristol University
Jochen Hinkel, Head of Department of Adaptation and Social Learning at the Global Climate Forum
R. Daniel Bressler, PhD Candidate in Economics at Columbia
Cullen Hendrix, Professor at the Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver
Andrew Watson, Royal Society Research Professor at the University of Exeter
Peter Kareiva, Pritzker Distinguished Professor in Environment & Sustainability, UCLA
Christina Schädel, Assistant Research Professor Center for Ecosystem Sciences and Society, Department of Biological Sciences, Northern Arizona University
Joshua Horton, Research Director, Geoengineering, Keith Group, Harvard
Laura Jackson, UK Met Office
Keith Wiebe, Senior Research Fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute
Matthew Burgess, Assistant Professor, Department of Environmental Studies, University of Colorado Boulder
David Denkenberger, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at University of Alaska Fairbanks
Peter Watson, Senior Research Fellow and Proleptic Senior Lecturer, School of Geographical Sciences, Cabot Institute for the Environment, University of Bristol
Goodwin Gibbins, Research Fellow, Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford
Linus Blomqvist, Senior Fellow at Breakthrough Institute, PhD candidate in Environmental Economics and Science at UC Santa Barbara
Luca Righetti, Research Fellow, Open Philanthropy Project
Johannes Ackva, Climate research lead, Founders Pledge
This is good, though offering comments on various sections of a google doc is of course a very different exercise to full and blind peer-review.
Did any of the reviewers notice that you had not mentioned (almost?) any climate-related GCR papers? If so, what was your response to them?
As per your comments about complex systems above, please do not dismissively mischaracterise the views of your critics. This is the kind of thing an average forum user would get hammered for, please do not try to get away with it just because you know you can.
If you discuss their arguments, why didn’t you cite them? If the X-risk climate corpus takes an ‘extreme’ stance by and large, is that not the kind of thing you would expect to see discussed in a >400 page report on climate change X-risk?
Even to the extent that this report is within the IPCC mainstream, notwithstanding, for instance:
The complete absence of systems perspectives (even just to justify your rejection, something I, to be frank, would expect in an undergraduate dissertation)
Lack of consideration of vulnerability, exposure, or cascading disasters
Silent disregard for Reisinger et al.’s discussion of the concept of risk
...it is well-known that the IPCC must moderate its conclusions and focus on better-case scenarios for political reasons, i.e. so as to not be written off as alarmist. You know this, because it is mentioned in Climate Endgame and discussed at length by Jehn et al.
This is another rather important issue in climate risk scholarship you would expect to see mentioned in a work this long.
“it is well-known that the IPCC must moderate its conclusions and focus on better-case scenarios for political reasons, i.e. so as to not be written off as alarmist”
As a climate scientist reading this, I just thought I’d pick up on that and say I have not got that impression from reading the reports or conversations with my colleagues who are IPCC authors. I’ve not seen any strong evidence presented that the IPCC systematically understates risks—there are a couple of examples where risks were perhaps not discussed (not clearly underestimated as far as I’ve seen), but I can also think of at least one example where it looked to me like IPCC authors put too much weight on predictions of large changes (sea ice in AR5). (This is distinct from the thought that the IPCC doesn’t do enough to discuss low-likelihood, high-impact possibilities, which I agree with.)
It might be good to zoom out here and get a sense of what the criticism is here. I am being criticised for not citing four papers. One of them is by you and Kemp, is not peer-reviewed and is not primarily about climate change. The other one is Kemp et al 2022 which was published two weeks before I published my report so I didn’t have time to include discussion of it. The other papers I am being criticised for not mentioning are Beard et al and Richards et al. If you want to explain to me why the points they raise are not addressed in my report, I would be happy to have that discussion.
The Jehn et al papers make claims which are wrong. It is blatantly not true to anyone who knows anything about climate change that the climate science literature ignores warming of more than 3ºC.
For those who haven’t read the full comments section, Halstead has decided that I am Carla Zoe Cremer.
Democratising Risk is a preprint, no?
Democratising Risk is not primarily about climate change, but it is about X-risk methodology. You have written a piece about X-risk. Scholarly works generally require a methodology section, and scholars are expected to justify their methodology, especially when it is a controversial one. This is advice I would give to any undergraduate I supervised.
It is true that Kemp et al. 2022 has not been published for long, so you can be excused for not discussing it at length. It seems odd to have not mentioned it at all though: two weeks is not a huge amount of time, but enough to at least mention by far the most prominent work of climate GCR work to date.
If you discuss Beard’s and Richards’ points, why don’t you cite them? In any case, justification for the lack of substantive engagement seems like something you need to offer, rather than me.
In any case, the lack of mention of most climate-specific GCR work is not the only thing you have been criticised for: please scroll up to see Gideon’s original comment if you like.
Jehn et al., do not say that climate science literature ignores warming of more than 3C, they say that it is heavily under-represented.
Again, please stop lazily mischaracterising the views of your critics.
I don’t know if this repeated strawman-ing is accidental or not: if accidental, please improve your epistemics, if not, please try to engage in good faith.
This is an interesting point of view, that you should have mentioned and justified, as any student would be expected to in an essay, rather than simply pretending that criticisms do not exist
The report was reviewed by various people with expertise in various different aspects of climate change. The reviewers are pasted at the bottom of this comment.
The criticism raised by GIdeon seems to be that it doesn’t cite some studies that take an extreme stance on climate risk relative to mainstream climate scientists and climate economists. I discuss many of the claims made in these papers at considerable length. If you disagree with some of my substantive claims, then I would be happy to discuss them.
I don’t think my report is outside the mainstream of IPCC science. I can’t think of any substantive claims that are inconsistent with the latest IPCC report, with the exception of my criticism of the Burke et al (2015) paper and the ecosystem collapse stuff.
The reviewers for the report are below, though they may not agree with everything I have written.
Matthew Huber, Professor, Dept. of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, Purdue University
Dan Lunt, Professor of Climate Science, Bristol University
Jochen Hinkel, Head of Department of Adaptation and Social Learning at the Global Climate Forum
R. Daniel Bressler, PhD Candidate in Economics at Columbia
Cullen Hendrix, Professor at the Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver
Andrew Watson, Royal Society Research Professor at the University of Exeter
Peter Kareiva, Pritzker Distinguished Professor in Environment & Sustainability, UCLA
Christina Schädel, Assistant Research Professor Center for Ecosystem Sciences and Society, Department of Biological Sciences, Northern Arizona University
Joshua Horton, Research Director, Geoengineering, Keith Group, Harvard
Laura Jackson, UK Met Office
Keith Wiebe, Senior Research Fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute
Matthew Burgess, Assistant Professor, Department of Environmental Studies, University of Colorado Boulder
David Denkenberger, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at University of Alaska Fairbanks
Peter Watson, Senior Research Fellow and Proleptic Senior Lecturer, School of Geographical Sciences, Cabot Institute for the Environment, University of Bristol
Goodwin Gibbins, Research Fellow, Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford
Linus Blomqvist, Senior Fellow at Breakthrough Institute, PhD candidate in Environmental Economics and Science at UC Santa Barbara
Luca Righetti, Research Fellow, Open Philanthropy Project
Johannes Ackva, Climate research lead, Founders Pledge
James Ozden, Extinction Rebellion
This is good, though offering comments on various sections of a google doc is of course a very different exercise to full and blind peer-review.
Did any of the reviewers notice that you had not mentioned (almost?) any climate-related GCR papers? If so, what was your response to them?
As per your comments about complex systems above, please do not dismissively mischaracterise the views of your critics. This is the kind of thing an average forum user would get hammered for, please do not try to get away with it just because you know you can.
If you discuss their arguments, why didn’t you cite them? If the X-risk climate corpus takes an ‘extreme’ stance by and large, is that not the kind of thing you would expect to see discussed in a >400 page report on climate change X-risk?
Even to the extent that this report is within the IPCC mainstream, notwithstanding, for instance:
The complete absence of systems perspectives (even just to justify your rejection, something I, to be frank, would expect in an undergraduate dissertation)
Lack of consideration of vulnerability, exposure, or cascading disasters
Silent disregard for Reisinger et al.’s discussion of the concept of risk
...it is well-known that the IPCC must moderate its conclusions and focus on better-case scenarios for political reasons, i.e. so as to not be written off as alarmist. You know this, because it is mentioned in Climate Endgame and discussed at length by Jehn et al.
This is another rather important issue in climate risk scholarship you would expect to see mentioned in a work this long.
“it is well-known that the IPCC must moderate its conclusions and focus on better-case scenarios for political reasons, i.e. so as to not be written off as alarmist”
As a climate scientist reading this, I just thought I’d pick up on that and say I have not got that impression from reading the reports or conversations with my colleagues who are IPCC authors. I’ve not seen any strong evidence presented that the IPCC systematically understates risks—there are a couple of examples where risks were perhaps not discussed (not clearly underestimated as far as I’ve seen), but I can also think of at least one example where it looked to me like IPCC authors put too much weight on predictions of large changes (sea ice in AR5). (This is distinct from the thought that the IPCC doesn’t do enough to discuss low-likelihood, high-impact possibilities, which I agree with.)
It might be good to zoom out here and get a sense of what the criticism is here. I am being criticised for not citing four papers. One of them is by you and Kemp, is not peer-reviewed and is not primarily about climate change. The other one is Kemp et al 2022 which was published two weeks before I published my report so I didn’t have time to include discussion of it. The other papers I am being criticised for not mentioning are Beard et al and Richards et al. If you want to explain to me why the points they raise are not addressed in my report, I would be happy to have that discussion.
The Jehn et al papers make claims which are wrong. It is blatantly not true to anyone who knows anything about climate change that the climate science literature ignores warming of more than 3ºC.
For those who haven’t read the full comments section, Halstead has decided that I am Carla Zoe Cremer.
Democratising Risk is a preprint, no?
Democratising Risk is not primarily about climate change, but it is about X-risk methodology. You have written a piece about X-risk. Scholarly works generally require a methodology section, and scholars are expected to justify their methodology, especially when it is a controversial one. This is advice I would give to any undergraduate I supervised.
It is true that Kemp et al. 2022 has not been published for long, so you can be excused for not discussing it at length. It seems odd to have not mentioned it at all though: two weeks is not a huge amount of time, but enough to at least mention by far the most prominent work of climate GCR work to date.
If you discuss Beard’s and Richards’ points, why don’t you cite them? In any case, justification for the lack of substantive engagement seems like something you need to offer, rather than me.
In any case, the lack of mention of most climate-specific GCR work is not the only thing you have been criticised for: please scroll up to see Gideon’s original comment if you like.
Jehn et al., do not say that climate science literature ignores warming of more than 3C, they say that it is heavily under-represented.
Again, please stop lazily mischaracterising the views of your critics.
I don’t know if this repeated strawman-ing is accidental or not: if accidental, please improve your epistemics, if not, please try to engage in good faith.
This is an interesting point of view, that you should have mentioned and justified, as any student would be expected to in an essay, rather than simply pretending that criticisms do not exist