# Roger Pielke Jr Back to [[Topics/Climate Change Science and Policy Debate/Climate Change Science and Policy Debate|Climate Change Science and Policy Debate]] · [[Topics/Climate Change Science and Policy Debate/Research and Evidence|Research and Evidence]] **Role:** Political scientist (University of Colorado Boulder; AEI); prominent critic of RCP8.5 as a 'business as usual' baseline. - Professor emeritus at CU Boulder and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute ⚠️ (roles from memory). - **Pielke & Ritchie 2021**, "Distorting the view of our climate future: The misuse and abuse of climate pathways and scenarios", *Energy Research & Social Science* 72:101890 ([doi](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2020.101890)). It argued that RCP8.5 was widely misused as "business as usual" in research and media. - He accepts human-caused warming. His critique concerns scenario use and disaster-loss trends, not the physics. His work is frequently cited by Bjørn Lomborg, making him a bridge figure for this topic's policy side. - Clack's "implausible" framing borrows from this critique and stretches it into "no crisis".