The Rightful Place of Science Quotes

“extreme event there are inevitably many media stories that ask “did climate change cause X?”[55] This question is inherently nonsensical. “Climate change” is not a causal actor. It is a statistical property that reflects the consequences of causes.”
― Roger Pielke, The Rightful Place of Science: Disasters and Climate Change

“recent experience proves an essential policy point: Make clean(er) energy cheap,[115] and dirty energy will be quickly displaced.”
― Roger Pielke, The Rightful Place of Science: Disasters and Climate Change

“Climate skeptics are not all powerful and may not even be much relevant to efforts to decarbonize the global economy. They are not the reason that we haven’t solved the climate change problem, but they are an easy explanation for more than twenty years of failed campaigning.”
― Roger Pielke, The Rightful Place of Science: Disasters and Climate Change

“public opinion should be a political asset for those working to advance policies to address climate change. But efforts to intensify public opinion through apocalyptic visions of weather-gone-wild or appeals to scientific authority, instead of motivating further support for action, have instead led to a loss of trust in campaigning scientists.”
― Roger Pielke, The Rightful Place of Science: Disasters and Climate Change

“There is such a furor of concern about the linkage between greenhouse forcing and floods that it causes society to lose focus on the things we already know for certain about floods and how to mitigate and adapt to them. Blaming climate change for flood losses makes flood losses a global issue that appears to be out of the control of regional or national institutions. The scientific community needs to emphasize that the problem of flood losses is mostly about what we do on or to the landscape and that will be the case for decades to come.”
― Roger Pielke, The Rightful Place of Science: Disasters and Climate Change

“For instance, there is a broad consensus that there has been greater hurricane activity in the North Atlantic since 1970. However, there is also a broad consensus that the increase since 1970 falls within the variability observed in North Atlantic hurricanes observed since 1900.[51] Thus, “climate change” as defined by the IPCC has not been detected with respect to hurricanes.”
― Roger Pielke, The Rightful Place of Science: Disasters and Climate Change

“As you will see in the chapters which follow, disaster losses have increased dramatically over recent decades. However, once past losses are adjusted for societal changes (more houses, more possessions, and so on), there is no remaining increase, leaving essentially no residual trend to be explained.”
― Roger Pielke, The Rightful Place of Science: Disasters and Climate Change

“this hypothetical example, storm damage has doubled over a decade. However, the increased damage was not because of stronger or more frequent storms. The increase in damage was entirely due to the doubling of the amount of exposed property.”
― Roger Pielke, The Rightful Place of Science: Disasters and Climate Change

“Funding could be raised through a low carbon tax—one consistent with the provisions of the iron law. A public commitment to energy innovation might be realized by recognizing the world’s need for vastly more energy and the rights of billions of people to energy access commensurate with the richest around the world. An appeal to opportunity and growth will always find a stronger political constituency than demands for higher costs and limits.”
― Roger Pielke, The Rightful Place of Science: Disasters and Climate Change

“summary, there continues to be a lack of evidence and thus low confidence regarding the sign of trend in the magnitude and/or frequency of floods on a global scale.[86]”
― Roger Pielke, The Rightful Place of Science: Disasters and Climate Change

“five-year period ending 2013 has seen 2 total hurricane (Cat 1+) landfalls. That was a record low for any five-year period since 1900. Two other five-year periods have seen 3 landfalls (years ending in 1984 and 1994). Prior to 1970 the fewest landfalls over a five-year period was 6. From 1940 to 1957, every 5-year period had more than 10 hurricane landfalls (1904-1920 was almost as active). These data suggest that the U.S., even with Superstorm Sandy, has been in a relatively benign period of hurricane activity, at least as compared to past eras.”
― Roger Pielke, The Rightful Place of Science: Disasters and Climate Change

“The analysis of twenty-two disaster loss studies shows that economic losses from various weather related natural hazards, such as storms, tropical cyclones, floods, and small-scale weather events such as wildfires and hailstorms, have increased around the globe. The studies show no trends in losses, corrected for changes (increases) in population and capital at risk, that could be attributed to anthropogenic climate change. Therefore it can be concluded that anthropogenic climate change so far has not had a significant impact on losses from natural disasters.”
― Roger Pielke, The Rightful Place of Science: Disasters and Climate Change

“For instance, by some measures global average surface temperature has slowed its rate of increase or even paused over the past decade or so. Some point to this as evidence that climate change, as measured by the warming of global average surface temperature, has stopped. While such a slowdown might give scientists good reasons to ask hard questions of climate model projections, it has been going on for too short a time period to understand what, if anything, it might be telling us about changes in climate, which is only discernible on longer time scales.”
― Roger Pielke, The Rightful Place of Science: Disasters and Climate Change

“For example, with respect to North Atlantic hurricanes, the fact that there has not been detection of a change in the statistics of storms since 1900 means that there is not a climate change signal to be attributed. This stands in contrast to the robust detection of an increase in global average surface temperatures since the 19th century, which the IPCC attributes with high levels of certainty to human causes.”
― Roger Pielke, The Rightful Place of Science: Disasters and Climate Change

“More precisely, the IPCC’s climate model projections of changes in extreme events do not show identifiable increases in disaster losses for many decades, and often much longer.”
― Roger Pielke, The Rightful Place of Science: Disasters and Climate Change

“Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of skeptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them.”
― Roger Pielke, The Rightful Place of Science: Disasters and Climate Change