Why, we were just telling scary stories – say the climate-doomers
For some reason, Now It Can Be Told:
You’ve probably never heard of the term “RCP 8.5” — the highest-emission scenario used by climate scientists to project the planet’s future. But if you’ve read about climate change, you’ve seen the numbers and nightmarish outcomes it produced: 4°C of warming by 2100, sometimes 5°C, sea level rising multiple feet, parts of the planet too hot for humans.
Those numbers shaped a decade and a half of climate journalism, including a lot of my own when I covered climate change at Time magazine. I didn’t always know — and didn’t always communicate — that the scenario behind the most apocalyptic, attention-getting findings was largely an attempt to imagine how bad things could get, not a true forecast. But I wasn’t alone. RCP 8.5 was a frequent background presence in climate journalism.
So are we to conclude that author Bryan Walsh sometimes did know and yet failed to communicate that he was writing the equivalent of a Hollywood script?
As for why he’s telling the tale now, it’s a domino effect:
Last month, though, the scientists who built that scenario formally retired it. In a paper published in Geoscientific Model Development, Detlef van Vuuren and more than 40 co-authors eliminated RCP 8.5 from the scenarios that will feed into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Seventh Assessment Report, which is due in 2029. Based on falling clean-energy costs, climate policy, and recent emissions trends, the highest-emissions pathway had become, in their words, “implausible.”
Walsh still says things will be bad, just not as bad. But why would we trust that prediction?
Was RCP 8.5 ever realistic? One camp of experts, led by climate scientist Zeke Hausfather and energy modeler Glen Peters, argues that RCP 8.5 was plausible in 2011, but was taken off the table by genuine policy and technology progress. The other camp, led by Roger Pielke Jr., argues that the rate of global decarbonization has been roughly linear for decades. That would mean we didn’t actively avoid RCP 8.5; it was just never realistic to begin with. Both camps agree on what counts, though: RCP 8.5 should be gone, and the planet is still on track to warm between 2.5° and 3° by 2100.
Walsh seems to be saying, in most of the article, that if we could predict the policy we could predict the climate. But I have always thought that’s a case of hubris. There are too many variables and too many unknowns interacting in too complex and too poorly-understood a fashion. And that’s even if you assume that scientists and journalists are always acting in good faith, which is – as they say – somewhat implausible.
The models were never falsifiable; that is, their theories cannot be subjected to the usual scientific method of theory, test, review results, revise theory if needed. We had an epic discussion about this a few years ago with an old friend, a top-tier researcher in space physics. My husband, with degrees in physics and electrical engineering, kept saying, “But, [friend], what about the scientific method?” She just kept saying, “They’re experts and they have models.”
Ah, modelers; groundwater flow modelers, contaminant fate and transport modelers, excess cancer risk (for humans) modelers projecting from now to a thousand years into the future for the cleanup of radioactive waste. Hubris? Science? Not sure but very expensive. Good thing they figured out that there was not enough money in the world to safely dig up the underground tanks and associated piping where I work. Start with removing and treating the waste (make glass or grout); that should be done by 2070. Long after I’ve passed, become a Norwegian Blue.
Climate change modeling? Much, much farther removed from reality than the models above IMO.
Chalk up those costs to stoping totalitarian fascists and totalitarian communists. Temporarily anyway. But Iran having a nuke, what about my gas price!
Yup. The United Nations IPCC and their RCP X.Y scenarios have been trending downward in alarmist temperatures for a long while now. I’m surprised they are still as high as 2.5 to 3 degrees.
Aside from the general outrage about projections that were serious alarmist BS and that their idiots (think Carol Browner) would thump the podium with the smoke screen “peer reviewed science!” there are two things that really bug me about this.
1) neo calls it hubris, but yes… There are definitely going to be complexities that they just don’t understand well. The one I focus on are the various feedback effects that could greatly reduce the temperature increase. The modelers invoke feedback as a mechanism that makes things worse, which is possible. But it is just as possible that the dominant feedback mechanism(s) make things much better.
For example, for a while some claimed that the flora biosphere sucking CO2 out of the air had no feedback effect. Their concept is that dead plant life sitting out in the open air will decay and release its carbon back into the air, which can happen. But much of it won’t, as they now understand. Yes, plants can sequester carbon.
I don’t know if it is a practical time scale, but erosion of rock and earth also sequesters carbon out of atmospheric CO2.
2) The flora biosphere LOVES the extra CO2 that we now have in the air because of our fossil fuel consumption. Tens of millions of years ago, the atmospheric levels of CO2 were roughly ten times higher than now. Plants today are essentially carbon starved, though a bit less than they were 100 years ago. Crop production everywhere is higher now compared to 100 years ago.
How often do you hear about that?
Roger Pielke, Jr (https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/) has written pretty extensively about the problems with RCP 8.5. John Stossel’s YT video at the link is well worth watching.
And now these same people huff and puff about people not trusting science. We trust science. Science presents evidence and shows proof. Scientism bullies and lies and can’t understand when people turn away from them.
I say that the climate-change table-pounders have been conducting a science-resembling activity and doing so in bad faith.
As a physicist with a somewhat-pertinent background (astronomy), my growing skepticism was informed by the revelations of “Climategate” in late 2009. But the most potent “datum” I’ve encountered was an interview of William Happer published in Princeton’s student newspaper about the time Happer was going to be testifying on the subject before a Senate subcommittee. Happer, a world-class optical physicist (member of the National Academy of Sciences, in a named chair at Princeton, etc.) had been Undersecretary of Energy in charge of the department’s $3 billion/year budget for basic research under the first President Bush. From that interview:
Happer explained that his beliefs about climate change come from his experience at the Department of Energy, at which Happer said he supervised all non-weapons energy research, including climate change research. Managing a budget of more than $3 billion, Happer said he felt compelled to make sure it was being spent properly. “I would have [researchers] come in, and they would brief me on their topics,” Happer explained. “They would show up. Shiny faces, presentation ready to go. I would ask them questions, and they would be just delighted when you asked. That was true of almost every group that came in.”
The exceptions were climate-change scientists, he said.
“They would give me a briefing. It was a completely different experience. I remember one speaker who asked why I wanted to know, why I asked that question. So I said, you know I always ask questions at these briefings … I often get a much better view of [things] in the interchange with the speaker,” Happer said. “This guy looked at me and said, ‘What answer would you like?’ I knew I was in trouble then. This was a community even in the early 1990s that was being turned political. [The attitude was] ‘Give me all this money, and I’ll get the answer you like.’”
Happer said he is dismayed by the politicization of the issue and believes the community of climate-change scientists has become a veritable “religious cult,” noting that nobody understands or questions any of the science.
He noted in an interview that in the past decade, despite what he called “alarmist” claims, there has not only not been warming, there has in fact been global cooling. He added that climate change scientists are unable to use models to either predict the future or accurately model past events.
[snip]
“[Climate-change theory has] been extremely bad for science. It’s going to give science a really bad name in the future,” he said. “I think science is one of the great triumphs of humankind, and I hate to see it dragged through the mud in an episode like this.”
The Happer interview avoids all the clutter and disputes about the climate data and the complicated models. Instead, it provides a telling sociological observation. (At least it strikes one physicist — me — as sociological! It’s all about understanding pretty obvious behavior among other humans.) I think Happer’s observation is damning of the adherents’ community and is consistent with the picture that “Climategate” seemed, on its face, to reveal.
A handmade tale… another one.
— om
Both. Neither.
Mathematical modeling is a tool, nothing more and nothing less. It can be a very useful tool, but also a very dangerous one because it can easily lead to overconfidence.
There’s a saying in the business: “All models are wrong, but some are wrong in a useful way.”
That is, no model ever perfectly models its subject, and no model ever allows for every extenuating factor, and no model is error-free. Yet a well-made, well-data-ed model can give useful results and predictions under some circumstances. We see an example of improving models in short-term weather forecasting, which has improved in accuracy by leaps and bounds over the last 30 years, but which is still far from perfect.
GIGO is always a consideration, both in creating the model and feeding it data.
Plus, of course, the issues that can arise when intentional dishonesty is in play.
— Martin
‘Believe in science’ is meaningless. It’s like saying we ‘believe in haberdashery’. Science is an activity that humans engage in, of course we believe that this activity is real.
The question is not belief in science, it’s belief in the trustworthiness and/or competence of specific scientists.
Just MORE bull-doohickey from the Left.
(Pretty creative, though…not to mention entertaining…. Should we talk about all the people who were badly hurt by it???)
File under: Follow the seance!!
If climate was such a world ender why didn’t the climate scientists/advocates devote the same energy to the pollution of India/China? Possibly because it would shut off the money flow? Science has totally invalidated itself.
All the chaps over at the computer science department of your typical post-secondary level educational institution repeated, “Garbage in, garbage out.” The other chaps down in the earth/climate sciences department said with a smile, “Yes, indeed” and proceeed to load up their models with garbage. The politicians who funded them asked, “How much money do you want for research?” and the climate guys asked, “How much ya got?” See how that worked?
Victory Speech: AG Ken Paxton speaks after Beating incumbent RINO Cornyn in Texas! VIDEO
https://commoncts.blogspot.com/2026/05/victory-speech-ag-ken-paxton-speaks.html
Per Scott Adams, “wait until you find out about the climate models.” Models are fake and gay, not science. As the money for climate fraud dries up, I expect more climate “scientists” will find more courage to be honest.
The global warming scare began to turn political in the early 2000s as the actual data was not conforming with the models. As we progress to around 2010, that’s when the left takes over the science as noted when “global warming” suddenly became “climate change”. As it became known at my college that I was the climate gadfly, in a fit of contrarianism, the faculty voted to put me on the college’s Environment Committee. The committee was chaired by a employee who was hired to be the college’s environmental steward. In a moment of honesty, he declared at his first meeting that really all this climate/environment stuff is really just a vehicle for furthering “social justice”. Everyone on the committee, except me, sagely nodded their heads.
Torture your model until it agrees with you.
Physicsguy,
A great man – Thomas Sowell – once remarked that “envy was once considered to be one of the 7 deadly sins before it became one of the most admired virtues under its new name, ‘social justice.’ “
As others have said, if climate change was such an existential threat, why wouldn’t the “international community” be cracking down on the world’s leading polluters (by far), China and India, rather than tiny countries like Switzerland?
There is probably video floating around of the time when a young Greta Thunberg (then a true believer in climate change) brought up this obvious contradiction at a conference and they promptly cut her microphone.
The damage that was done was not to the climate.
no shame. none at all.
A treat for Jonathan Swift groupies…
“WHAT SWIFT SAW”—
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2026/05/what-swift-saw.php