As I understand it, overestimation of sensitivity tails has been understood for a long time, arguably longer than EA has existed, and sources like Wagner & Weitzman were knowably inaccurate even when they were published. Also, as I understand it, although it has gotten more so over time, RCP8.5 has been considered to be much worse than the expected no-policy outcome since the beginning despite often being presented as the expected no-policy outcome. It seems to me that referring to most of the information presented by this post as “news” fails to adequately blame the EA movement and others for not having looked below the surface earlier.
I think you are right that a lot of these points have been around in the scientific literature for a while. What has changed now is that they are definitely mainstream. The Sherwood et al paper has really helped to formalise the findings of the Annan and Hargreaves paper from years ago, and that has all now been recognised by the IPCC. James Annan told me that he did raise the point about priors with Weitzman a while ago but didn’t get anywhere.
One thing that has changed in recent years is that whereas the IEA and others used to estimate that RCP6 was the most likely emissions scenario, it looks like RCP4.5 is the most likely scenario, on current policy. And even that may be too pessimistic
As I understand it, overestimation of sensitivity tails has been understood for a long time, arguably longer than EA has existed, and sources like Wagner & Weitzman were knowably inaccurate even when they were published. Also, as I understand it, although it has gotten more so over time, RCP8.5 has been considered to be much worse than the expected no-policy outcome since the beginning despite often being presented as the expected no-policy outcome. It seems to me that referring to most of the information presented by this post as “news” fails to adequately blame the EA movement and others for not having looked below the surface earlier.
I think you are right that a lot of these points have been around in the scientific literature for a while. What has changed now is that they are definitely mainstream. The Sherwood et al paper has really helped to formalise the findings of the Annan and Hargreaves paper from years ago, and that has all now been recognised by the IPCC. James Annan told me that he did raise the point about priors with Weitzman a while ago but didn’t get anywhere.
One thing that has changed in recent years is that whereas the IEA and others used to estimate that RCP6 was the most likely emissions scenario, it looks like RCP4.5 is the most likely scenario, on current policy. And even that may be too pessimistic