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The world has been going to end in the next ten years since I was a boy. In fact, if I had a dollar for every time the planet faced imminent death “Unless we act in the next five years”, well… I’d be rich enough to be a climate activist.
“The Boy Who Cried Wolf” is a cautionary tale for a very good reason: the more you shriek and gibber about imaginary threats, the less likely people are to take any notice. So it is that, despite decades of unhinged fear-mongering from the Climate Cult and its elite adherents, ordinary folk around the world regularly rate climate change last of a list of issues that concern them.
So, do the Cultists realise that their swivel-eyed hysteria isn’t fooling anyone, and slink away in shame? Of course not: they just shriek and stamp their feet harder.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has issued a new Synthesis Report, with fanfare from UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.
“The climate time bomb is ticking but the latest IPCC report shows that we have the knowledge and resources to tackle the climate crisis. We need to act now to ensure a liveable planet in the future,” Guterres announced over Twitter earlier this month.
The climate cultists love to burble about “The Science™!”, but there is a vast difference between the actual scientific work the IPCC does — which is published in the Assessment Reports — and the “Summary for Policymakers”, which is a purely political report with some stuff cherry-picked from the Assessment Report.
The media and politicians, being the scientific illiterates that they are, don’t even bother to read the Summary, of course: all the headline-grabbing hysteria we are inundated with comes from press releases accompanying the Summary.
So, the Climate Cult are just the bottom-feeders at the end of a chain of Chinese whispers that gets further and further from anything remotely resembling science at every step.
This “Synthesis Report” takes the concatenation another step further down the rung into the muck of pseudoscience.
This Synthesis Report does not introduce any new information or findings. While the IPCC reports include some good material, the Summary for Policymakers for the Synthesis Report emphasises weakly justified findings on climate impacts driven by extreme emissions scenarios, and politicised policy recommendations on emissions reductions.
The Synthesis Report reflects the desperation of liars who’ve been caught in the act, choosing to double down on the lies.
The most important finding of the past five years is that the extreme emissions scenarios RCP8.5 and SSP5-8.5, commonly referred to as “business-as-usual” scenarios, are now widely recognised as implausible. These extreme scenarios have been dropped by the UN Conference of the Parties to the UN Climate Agreement. However, the new Synthesis Report continues to emphasise these extreme scenarios, while this important finding is buried in a footnote:
“Very high emission scenarios have become less likely but cannot be ruled out.”
Everything you’ve been told about the “climate crisis” and “tipping points”, though, is based on these implausible extreme emissions scenarios.
The extreme emissions scenarios are associated with alarming projections of 4-5C of warming by 2100. The most recent Conference of the Parties (COP27) is working from a baseline temperature projection based on a medium emissions scenario of 2.5C by 2100 […]
Rejecting these extreme scenarios has rendered obsolete much of the climate impacts literature and assessments of the past decade, that have focused on these scenarios.
In fact, the most likely scenario, even assuming that the IPCC’s “models” are accurate (they’re not: they’re demonstrably prone to over-heating), is well under 2C warming by 2100. Exactly what the Climate Cult want. So, why aren’t they trumpeting the good news?
Clearly, the climate “crisis” isn’t what it used to be. Rather than acknowledging this fact as good news, the IPCC and UN officials are doubling down on the “alarm” regarding the urgency of reducing emissions by eliminating fossil fuels. You might think that if warming is less than we thought, then the priorities would shift away from emissions reductions and towards reducing our vulnerability to weather and climate extremes. However, that hasn’t been the case.
Because the IPCC long ago abandoned even pretending to be a scientific organisation: it is a nakedly political activist group. Like most extremist activists, it lies through its teeth.
It is misleading policymakers by its continued emphasis on extreme climate outcomes driven by the implausible extreme emissions scenarios […]
Climate change has become a grand narrative in which human-caused climate change has become a dominant cause of societal problems. Everything that goes wrong reinforces the conviction that there is only one thing we can do to prevent societal problems – stop burning fossil fuels. This grand narrative leads us to think that if we solve the problem of burning fossil fuels, then these other problems would also be solved.
The Australian
The Climate Cult isn’t just not fixing anything, it’s making them actively worse. New Zealanders should realise this only too well: instead of focussing its energy on building resilient cities and adopting policies to mitigate the impacts of extreme weather, the government has been singularly obsessed with slashing emissions.
The recent storms ought never to have been the catastrophes they were, had the government only bothered preparing for them instead of chasing invisible chimaeras in the sky.