Although Richard “Gizmo” Tol’s new PLOS One study hasn’t gotten much coverage yet, its Trump-friendly conclusion that warming benefited the 20th century means it’s sure to get some attention soon.
Carbon Brief’s Roz Pidcock reached out to experts and produced a rebuttal that is as thorough as it is scathing. Tol’s failings are numerous, but the short version is that the paper relies on an “odd use of outdated assumptions, old datasets and now-defunct models.”
Tol’s paper is based on the output of three key climate-economic models, PAGE, DICE and FUND. But instead of using the most accurate and up-to-date versions, he inexplicably used old ones.
To quickly summarize just part of Pidcock’s lay-friendly explainer in an admittedly not-lay-friendly runthrough, Tol used the temperature data from HadCRUT3 instead of the newer and more comprehensive version 4, the 2002 version of the PAGE model, DICE model versions from 1999 and 2007, and the 2012 version of Tol’s own FUND model that’s since been updated three times. And you’ll no doubt be shocked that the newer versions of these models tend to show greater damages, so the use of the outdated versions contributes to the conclusion that warming’s been good.
In case it wasn’t clear, “using a dataset that is outdated is not good science,” Professor Reto Knutti of Swiss Federal Institute of Technology told Pidcock.
Dr. Richard Rosen (who as far as we know has never had to blame gremlins for his mistakes like Tol) said that in regards to Tol’s attempt to parse out impacts from natural vs human forcings, “It is crazy that the authors would be so preposterous as to make the claims they do.”
Ironically, making odd assumptions with defunct models and old data is exactly the sort of biased model manipulation that Koch-funded Heritage Foundation’s Dr. Kevin Dayaratna accused government scientists of doing at this week’s SCC hearing and a similar Heritage event we touched on a couple weeks ago.
Except Dayaratna was saying that an honest run of the models shows benefits to warming like Tol suggests, and the sort of model trickery Tol has done here is what he accused government and “alarmist” scientists of doing to justify their policy preferences. Seems that, yet again, reality is the opposite of whatever a Mercer or Koch-funded lackey says.
Tol should really stop and consider his reputation next time he goes to write another piece of carbon pollution apologia like this, as it’s always DICE-y to be on the same PAGE as those who get their FUNDs from the Kochs.
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