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Here at the University of Colorado-Boulder we have some big, big news. We are starting up a new sports governance center. You can read the details at this press release.

More to come in short order … a website, faculty affiliates and more!

You can find my syllabus for fall at this link. The class, ENVS 5100 Science and Technology Policy, is registered full, but I’ll take students on day one on a space available basis.

Comments on the syllabus welcome!

In the New York Times today I have a piece on the case of Dutee Chand, the Indian sprinter who fell afoul of regulations governing who gets to participate in women’s athletics events.

The issue is highly complex and a canonical case study in the challenges of trying to use science to settle contested policy issues. You can read the op-ed here.

At the Guardian, I have a piece up on how we are spending some effort to detect life beyond Earth, but not much attention to what we would do if we succeed. Here is a link.

I am happy to announce that I’ve committed to a second edition of The Honest Broker. In the coming months I’ll post up a table of contents and some details. There will be lots of new material and many updated cases/examples.

If you have comments or suggestions, I welcome them.

I have an op-ed up at USA Today on the train wreck that was US Soccer testifying before the US Senate earlier this week.

Comments welcomed!

For 10 years, 2005-2014 I wrote a quarterly column for Bridges, a newsletter on science policy by the staff of the Office of Science & Technology at the Austrian embassy in Washington, DC.  Thanks to Ami Nacu-Schmidt here at CSTPR all my columns have been formatted into an eBook, which you can download free.

Pielke, Jr., R. A. (2015), Pielke’s Perspective: A Collection of Articles from Bridges, OST’s Publication on Science & Technology Policy., 93 pp., Center for Science and Technology Policy Research, Published July 2015. (PDF)

Thanks to the editors and staff of the OST and the Austrian government for hosting my writing over the years!

In Fall, 2015, this talk will be shown in my graduate seminar, Science and Technology Policy.

Here is a paper that I did with a then-grad student, Samantha Stevenson, which we never did get published. It was a follow-up to Pielke, Wigley and Green 2008 and found that the assumptions of spontaneous decarbonization embedded into the IPCC FAR were also present in the RCPs of the AR5. If that gobbledygook makes sense, then this is a paper for you.

We’ve just posted it as a discussion paper. Caveat lector. Enjoy!

Stevenson, S. and R. A. Pielke, Jr. (2015), Assumptions of Spontaneous Decarbonization in the IPCC AR5 Baseline Scenarios. a discussion paper, Written in 2012, Published July 2015.

Abstract

Projections of future climate change depend upon future anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. In preparation for its Fifth Assessment Report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change implemented a new approach to generating emissions scenarios, called ‘Representative Concentration Pathways’ (RCPs), which replace the scenarios in the ‘Special Report on Emissions Scenarios’ (SRES). The RCPs are designed to provide a range of emissions consistent with a particular radiative imbalance, but projected climate policy actions are heavily influenced by the choice of ‘reference’ or baseline scenario, often derived from the SRES. Here we show that ‘built in’ to the RCP reference cases are some of the same implicit and aggressive assumptions regarding rates of the decarbonization of economic activity found in the SRES [1]. Rates of ‘automatic’ reduction in energy and carbon intensities in the RCPs in the absence of policy are broadly inconsistent with observations from 2000-2008. The ‘stabilization’ pathways used to drive physical climate models are more aggressive still, with reductions in carbon and energy intensities substantially larger than observed. The fact that much of the required improvement in energy and carbon intensities are built into the RCP reference scenarios has profound implications for our ability to evaluate climate stabilization goals.

Over at The Least Thing (link) I discuss the graph above, which shows how sprint times evolve for the world’s fastest men. The outlier is Justin Gatlin, shown in red.

This data, and much, more appears in my chapter on performance in The Least Thing.