The “Amazing Tale” of How Three Billionaires Plunged the World into Climate Catastrophism

…In 2012, three wealthy men, Bloomberg, hedge fund manager Tom Steyer and former CEO of Goldman Sachs Hank Paulson chipped in $500,000 each to fund a project “making the climate threat feel real, immediate and potentially devastating to the business world”. An early funded report was part-titled ‘Risky Business’ and it focused on RCP8.5 “as the pathway closest to a business-as-usual trajectory”. The pathway was said to be “closest to a future without concerted action to reduce future warming”.

…The “genius” of ‘Risky Business’ was it undertook a “sophisticated campaign” to introduce its methodological ideas into mainstream scientific literature, “where they would take on a life of their own”. In 2016, a paper from the ‘Risky Business’ project was published in the prestigious journal Science featuring the erroneous notion of moving from one RCP (Representative Concentration Pathway) scenario to another. Despite the obvious methodological flaw, notes Pielke, the paper passed peer-review with little or no criticism, and to date has been cited more than 1,100 times. “Hundreds, maybe thousands of papers followed similarly in adopting the same assumption of moving between incommensurate scenarios”, observes Pielke.

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