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For years, sensible voices warned that the IPCC was basing its scariest policy prescriptions on wildly unrealistic worst-case scenarios. Those voices were shouted down as ‘deniers’, smeared as cranks and dismissed as industry shills. Now they’ve been quietly and thoroughly vindicated – and the climate cult is pretending it never happened.
The worst-case scenarios that guide the work of climate scientists and feed into the major reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have been dramatically, quietly, and officially revised down.
This means that disaster scenarios that use tipping points and a cascading collapse of ocean, land and forest systems, big rises in sea levels and heatwaves that render large areas of the planet inhospitable to human life this century should no longer be used to scare policymakers into action.
It does not suggest that climate change is not happening but it is a reality check for how climate science has allowed itself to be hijacked by what often has resembled a death cult of catastrophe.
RCP8.5, the infamous “business as usual” pathway that delivered visions of 4–5°C warming, metre-plus sea-level rise, Amazon dieback, mass extinctions and uninhabitable equatorial zones has been declared ‘implausible’ by the very modellers who once flogged it as gospel. The new scenarios for the IPCC’s Seventh Assessment Report (AR7) slash emissions projections under the extreme pathway by 40 per cent. Even the medium and low scenarios have been adjusted to better match observed trends.
This only vindicates what so-called ‘deniers’, such as actual climate modeller Mototaka Nakamura, have said for years: models are “worse than useless” when it comes to modelling the real world. Yet, trillions of dollars have been wasted entirely on the backs of the same models the IPCC now admits were grotesquely exaggerated.
Roger Pielke Jr has called it “the most significant development in climate research in decades”.
“This is an absolutely huge development in climate science which will have lasting impacts across research and policy,” he says. “The future is not what it used to be” […]
Pielke claims the revised advice to researchers and modellers as a victory for science.
The revision has now been made at the heart of the Climate Cult, the IPCC, as scientists around the world prepare to draft the official update on the state of climate science.
Yet where is the screaming front-page mea culpa? Where are the earnest op-eds admitting the climate porn was overcooked? Crickets. This bombshell has been dropped quieter than a church mouse at an extinction rebellion rally. Politicians and legacy media who spent years hyperventilating about the end of civilisation are suddenly very interested in other stories.
This isn’t science correcting itself in the normal way. It’s the slow, embarrassed back-pedalling of an institution that let activism hijack the process. Remember Stephen Schneider’s infamous 1989 confession about “post-normal science”? Scientists, he said, must “offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts we might have”. Extreme predictions, in other words, were necessary to motivate policy action.
That was never science. That was propaganda dressed in a lab coat. And the people who pointed it out, Bjorn Lomborg chief among them, were treated like heretics. Lomborg has spent decades arguing that the real scandal isn’t climate change itself but the grotesque misallocation of resources toward futile mitigation fantasies when adaptation and prosperity deliver far better outcomes for far less money. He was right. The quiet rewrite of RCP8.5 is his vindication in spades.
Deservedly, the IPCC is running out of cash and increasingly short of acolytes. In the real world, far away from the jet-setting climate summits, the US has walked away from the Paris circus and the punters are noticing their power bills. The cult needs an exit ramp. This is it: slipped out in a technical paper while everyone looks the other way.
Don’t expect an apology though. The same people who screamed ‘denier!’ will simply move the goalposts and pretend the last decade of hysteria never happened. But the rest of us should remember.
More, we should be demanding accountability. The people who knowingly pushed bullshit activism should be stripped of their scientific status, not to mention the fat grants they’ve trousered for years. The UN should be made to pay back every cent it bullied and hectored us into spending on a paper dragon.
And no one should allow Gell-Mann amnesia to blindfold them when the Climate Cult rolls out its next round of doomsday predictions.
