The Climate Conversation is Changing: A round-up of recent commentary and science

From Roger Pielke. Excerpts:

"Many of the reactions to the DOE CWG have exposed pathologies of gatekeepers in the scientific community. For instance, climate scientist Kerry Emanuel2 (who helped to push me out from 538 back in the day) criticizes the CWG report for focusing on U.S. hurricane landfalls and not discussing the Caribbean, and in the process shares some blatant misinformation:

Given that the Caribbean region had a high population density (and associated newspaper accounts) going back to the early 19th century, they could have looked at ALL Atlantic landfalls, not just the U.S. Had they done so, they would have discovered a clear upward trend.

OK then, let’s look at that data. Chenoweth and Howard (2023) complied a time series of hurricane landfalls in the Caribbean from 1494. They found no upwards trend and a big surprise (emphasis added):

The central and eastern Caribbean Sea region has the longest continuous record of hurricane impacts anywhere in the world, extending back to 1494 CE Hurricane numbers and intensity in this region vary with the warm and cold phases of El Niño-Southern Oscillation. Hurricane frequency was lowest in the 20th century and stands out in the 529-year record for both length and duration"

"Peer-reviewed Research you Won’t See in the Media

• Prescribed burns in the western United States significantly reduces both extreme wildfire risk and air pollution. While there are many good arguments for accelerating the decarbonization of the economy, modulating forest fire risk is not high among them. Two new papers quantify the effects of prescribed burns on fires and air pollution:

  We find that locations ”treated” with low severity fire see an immediate 92% reduction in the probability of very high severity wildfires in the same location, with detectable reductions in high-severity fire risk lasting up to a decade and detectable up to 5 km from the treated locations. We estimate that the future benefits of low-severity fuel “treatments”, in terms of reduced smoke from severe fires, substantially outweigh the costs of the smoke produced in the initial treatment fires . . .

  Sources:

  • Kelp, M., Burke, M., Qiu, M., Higuera‐Mendieta, I., Liu, T., & Diffenbaugh, N. S. (2025). Effect of recent prescribed burning and land management on wildfire burn severity and smoke emissions in the western United States. AGU Advances, 6(3), e2025AV001682.

  • Higuera-Mendieta, I., & Burke, M. (2025). The air pollution benefits of low severity fire. EarthArXiv

• Adaptation outpaces changes in extreme heat in Europe. Most studies projecting future impacts of increasing heat waves ignore or downplay the role of adaptation. In the real world, adaptation works, as quantified in a new paper that looks at heat in Europe 2000 to 2022:

  During the analyzed period, Europe outpaced climate change, with the capacity to tolerate an additional 1°C rise every 17.9 years [95% CI 15.3–22.7]. . . Additionally, increasing economic output, likely driven by infrastructural improvements, especially greater affordability of air conditioning, enabled tolerating each additional 1°C due to a per capita GDP increase of 19.7 thousand euros . . .

  • Walkowiak, M. P., Bandurski, K., Walkowiak, J., & Walkowiak, D. (2025). Outpacing climate change: adaptation to heatwaves in Europe. International Journal of Biometeorology, 69(5), 989-1002.

• A counterfactual analysis of hurricanes Matthew (2016), Irma (2017), and Dorian (2019) finds that under a worst-case alternative track for each storm, insured damages would have been $1.2 trillion, $525 billion, and $250 billion respectively. These are massive numbers and suggest that the U.S. has not seen anything close to a worst case hurricane landfall.

  

“The top five downward counterfactuals by gross industry loss for each historical hurricane (light blue) and the top overall loss event (dark blue). The location of the City of Miami is marked in red.” Source: Rye and Boyd 2022.

In the worst-case counterfactuals, insured losses are nearly 300 times the reported loss for Hurricane Matthew, 25 times higher for Hurricane Irma, and over 250 times higher for Hurricane Dorian.

• Rye, C. J., & Boyd, J. A. (2022). Downward counterfactual analysis in insurance tropical cyclone models: A Miami case study. In Hurricane Risk in a Changing Climate (pp. 207-232). Cham: Springer International Publishing.

Europe has experienced several significant drought events in the 21st century. A long-term climate record shows that they are well within the bounds of natural variability.

By using long-term hydrological and meteorological observations, as well as paleoclimate reconstructions, here we show that central Europe has experienced much longer and severe droughts during the Spörer Minimum (~AD 1400–1480) and Dalton Minimum (~AD 1770–1840), than the ones observed during the 21st century. These two megadroughts appear to be linked with a cold state of the North Atlantic Ocean and enhanced winter atmospheric blocking activity over the British Isles and western part of Europe, concurrent with reduced solar forcing and explosive volcanism. Moreover, we show that the recent drought events (e.g., 2003, 2015, and 2018), are within the range of natural variability and they are not unprecedented over the last millennium.

• Ionita, M., Dima, M., Nagavciuc, V., Scholz, P., & Lohmann, G. (2021). Past megadroughts in central Europe were longer, more severe and less warm than modern droughts. Communications Earth & Environment, 2(1), 61."