Pure Science?

@RogerPielkeJr is probably one of the most vocal advocates of making clear what role scientist are assuming when they publish their results:

• Are they Pure Scientists, completely disinterested in what other people decide to do on the basis of the information they provide?

• Are they Science Arbiters, serving as a resource for the decision-makers, only answering factual questions that the decision-maker, and not the scientists , believes to be are relevant, without voicing an opinion of what the decision-maker should prefer?

• Are they Honest Brokers, trying to expand/clarify the scope of choices for decision-makers to act on his/her own preferences and values in a better informed way?

• Are they (Stealth) Issue Advocates, trying to convince the decision-maker to do the things that the scientist prefers (without telling them so)?

In a new article, he lays what what kind of science we can expect to see for the next few decades.

Here is the background: To normalize research scenarios of the climate future, a lot of climate scientist rely on emission scenarios. These try to model how much CO2 will be in the atmosphere in the future and how much warming that is likely to create. As Pielke showed in a journal article, the uncertainty about emission trajectories has narrowed so much, that the apocalyptical scenarios, which were still (albeit barely) in the cone of uncertainty 20 years ago, have fortunately turned out to be implausible. By a long shot.

But that doesn't stop thousands of studies per year to still use these discredited scenarios.

The Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) suffer from being decoupled from any assumptions about the socio-economic development: It's possible to model a world where everybody uses as much energy as the US, but made purely from coal, while still being as poor as Bangladesh is today and has as much flood protection as it does today.

After long years of debates and blaring headlines of doom, a new set of emission scenarios is finally being developed (REPs). But instead of fixing the problem of RCP, there are arguments

"that the REPs should remain separated from the underlying socioeconomic scenarios as was done previously under the RCPs"

How do you explain that the climate community decides to not evaluate scenario plausibility? Even the existing research on today's scenarios?

Anyway, the result is that essentially nothing gets fixed, because restricting the research to plausible scenarios is kind of boring :

While a policy-relevant question almost always entails a scientific question of interest, the scientific realm of questions is broader.

Probably the only thing we will get out of creating REPs is a dropping of the laughing stock, yet working horse of climate science - RCP8.5, often fraudulently refered to as "business as usual" (it never was), and its replacement with another emission scenario with implausibly high impacts as the new go to scenario, shattering a lot of hope that was put on the possible positives effects of the effort.

The scientific community, for some reason, has chosen to be of no use to real world decision-makers what so ever, because they decided to only look at worlds with so little energy use, that there is no way to get there (but hey, look at how minute the effect of humanity is on the climate!) and a world with implausibly high emissions (where climate change is really bad).

The future our world is currently heading to is not even modeled, making it hard for decision-makers to base the real-world decisions they have to face (more solar+batteries? synthetic fuel? dams? bans of cars? heat-pump mandates?) on anything that has been researched. (especially the local effects are virtual unknown)

In other words: Climate scientists decided to not craft the tools that could actually help decision makers in the real world. Despite spending a lot of time and funds on renewing their tool set, after it has proven to be useless to an astonishingly high percentage.

As Pielke oberserves

[T]he next several decades of climate science — and thus peer reviewed research, media coverage, climate advocacy, climate policy — are now being determined by a very small group of researchers, with a very narrow range of disciplinary expertise, without any underlying research on scenario plausibility or utility in decision making, and all (or nearly all) from the rich parts of the world, notably the U.S., U.K and Europe

He suggests to decouple the exploratory scenarios (of the broad scientific interest type, where all of a sudden political, technological and structural trends begin to trend in a negative direction) from actually policy relevant scenarios.

Given that the mere assertions of the policy relevance is as good a justification as any for funding purely science-(fiction)-focused scenarios and a seat at the table of power for modelers, I find it hard to imagine that there will be too many honest labels.

So what do you think? Are we only dealing with pure scientists here?