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.

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Dogs have “extensive and multifarious” environmental impacts, disturbing wildlife, polluting waterways and contributing to carbon emissions, new research has found.

An Australian review of existing studies has argued that “the environmental impact of owned dogs is far greater, more insidious, and more concerning than is generally recognised”.

While the environmental impact of cats is well known, the comparative effect of pet dogs has been poorly acknowledged, the researchers said. …

In the US, studies have found that deer, foxes and bobcats were less active in or avoid wilderness areas where dogs were allowed, while other research shows that insecticides from flea and tick medications kill aquatic invertebrates when they wash off into waterways. Dog faeces can also leave scent traces and affect soil chemistry and plant growth.

The carbon footprint of pets is also significant. A 2020 study found the dry pet food industry had an environmental footprint of around twice the land area of the UK, with greenhouse gas emissions – 56 to 151 Mt CO2 – equivalent to the 60th highest-emitting country.

The researchers were careful to state that they’re not anti-dog and that dog ownership has important pluses.

“A lot of what we’re talking about can be ameliorated by owners’ behaviour,” Bateman said, pointing out that low compliance with leash laws was a problem.

“Maybe, in some parts of the world, we actually need to consider some slightly more robust laws.”

He suggested that dog exclusion zones might be more suitable in some areas. …

“If nothing else, pick up your own dog shit,” he said.

I can’t disagree with that last sentiment – although I object to calling it “your own” dog shit. It’s really your dog’s, isn’t it?

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Large and destructive fires in California usually occur in the drier seasons and are often wind-whipped. The wind is definitely a factor in the current ones:

The Palisades Fire started burning around 10:30 a.m. Tuesday and scorched nearly 3,000 acres between the beach towns of Santa Monica and Malibu. Around 6:30 p.m., the Eaton Fire broke out in Altadena near Pasadena and swelled to more than 2,200 acres. By 10:30 p.m. a smaller blaze named the Hurst Fire had ignited in Sylmar, in the San Fernando Valley northwest of downtown Los Angeles and consumed about 500 acres.

The cause of all three blazes are still under investigation, according to Cal Fire. But the powerful Santa Ana winds are likely driving their rapid growth.

“The combination of low humidity, dry fuels and shifting winds has heightened the potential for spot fires and rapid expansion,” Cal Fire said in an update.

Governor Newsom and others on the left are of course blaming climate change. The story is far more complex than that, but it’s not politically expedient to emphasize the other reasons. I’ve written a lot about California wildfires, their causes, and how to control them: for example, see this and this. See also this article from 2017.

More about the present fire situation:

Jon Keeley, a senior research scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey, previously told USA TODAY climate change isn’t the only reason for the increase in large fires.

In California, population growth, increasing fire ignitions and the Santa Ana winds are bigger factors in wildfires, Keeley said.

This is from James Woods:

I took this last night from our beautiful little home in the Palisades. Now all the fire alarms are going off at once remotely.

It tests your soul, losing everything at once, I must say. pic.twitter.com/nH0mLpxz5C

— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) January 8, 2025

Having been very close to two people who “lost everything at once,” I’m well aware of how catastrophic it is. However, it pales in comparison to losing one’s life in a fire. RIP to the two people who have died in the present fires, which are as yet uncontained.

The post LA fires appeared first on The New Neo.

The former Secretary of State took part in a World Economic Forum panel on Green Energy on Wednesday. Near the end of the panel, a member of the audience asked what can be done to push back against disinformation surrounding climate change online.

“You know there’s a lot of discussion now about how you curb those entities in order to guarantee that you’re going to have some accountability on facts, etc. But look, if people only go to one source, and the source they go to is sick, and, you know, has an agenda, and they’re putting out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence,” Kerry said. …

He continued, “So what we need is to win the ground, win the right to govern, by hopefully winning enough votes that you’re free to be able to implement change.” …

“The dislike of and anguish over social media is just growing and growing. It is part of our problem, particularly in democracies, in terms of building consensus around any issue. It’s really hard to govern today. The referees we used to have to determine what is a fact and what isn’t a fact have kind of been eviscerated, to a certain degree. And people go and self-select where they go for their news, for their information. And then you get into a vicious cycle,” Kerry said.

Note the way Kerry puts it – the referees “have kind of been eviscerated.” By whom, Kerry? By nefarious forces? Or by their own demonstrated unreliability and bias, again and again and again? How many predictions have the climate change people made that have turned out to be wrong? Why have they sounded the alarm about climate change but have generally rejected nuclear power? And on and on and on. If they have “been eviscerated,” it is through a form of unintentional hari kari.

Elites generally tend to distrust free speech, for very obvious reasons. They are (as Sowell labeled them) the anointed, and therefore they know best about everything. So the temptation is always there to clamp down on those who disagree.

And sometimes what the elites are clamping down on really is disinformation, and sometimes it really is dangerous. I’m aware that this is a real dilemma. For example, on this blog, if I didn’t block trolls they actually would take over the entire comments section and drown out all the other voices. But although I write in a public venue, I’m not the public square in the sense that the internet as a whole is, or even that venues such as Twitter and Facebook are. With the latter sites, it’s easy to justify blocking bots and spam, but more difficult to justify blocking actual people who are posting ideas that seem bad on the face of it. How far does one go in doing that? Who gets to decide?

As that great mind Humpty Dumpty said in a slightly different contest, the question is who is to be master. Because, as COVID has so clearly underlined, the elites are often wrong – which doesn’t mean that all the people challenging them are any better at the science of it all. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. But the elites have squandered most of the trust people once had in them, and they are not good faith arbiters.

The argument for free speech has always been that in the free marketplace of ideas, the truth will prevail. Obviously, that’s more of a hope than a given. But so far it seems like the cure offered by Kerry is worse than the disease.

[NOTE: Glenn Reynolds writes on whether scientific fraud should be criminalized.]

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Even so, in a trial that most neutral observers would surely see as favoring the arguments of the defense, Mann walked away with a resounding, comprehensive victory.7 How did that happen?

In my view, there were two absolutely pivotal moments in the trial.

One occurred when Mann was testifying and he explained that he felt that the bloggers were not just criticizing him, but they were attacking all of climate science, and he could not let that stand. As the world’s most accomplished and famous climate scientist, Mann intimated that he was simply the embodiment of all of climate science.

For the jury, this set up the notion that this trial was not really about Mann, but about attacks on all of climate science from climate deniers.

The second pivotal moment occurred when in closing arguments Mann’s lawyer asked the jury to send a message to right-wing science deniers and Trump supporters with a large punitive damage award.

I’ve written about Pielke before, in this post from 2007.

The post Roger Pielke on the Mann trial appeared first on The New Neo.

So that’s why I refer to people such as this – and he is not alone – as a modern-day Icarus. It’s not a compliment.

The title of the NY Times article is “”Could a Giant Parasol in Outer Space Help Solve the Climate Crisis? Interest in sun shields, once a fringe idea, has grown. Now, a team of scientists says it could launch a prototype within a few years.” Here’s some of the text:

“To block the necessary amount of solar radiation, the shade would have to be about a million square miles, roughly the size of Argentina”….A shade that big would weigh at least 2.5 million tons — too heavy to launch into space, [Dr. Rozen] said. So, the project would have to involve a series of smaller shades. They would not completely block the sun’s light but rather cast slightly diffused shade onto Earth…. Dr. Rozen said his team was ready to design a prototype shade of 100 square feet and is seeking between $10 million and $20 million to fund the demonstration.

There will be more of this sort of thing. How will it be regulated or stopped? Will it be regulated or stopped?

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The wave of the future, I suppose. Some day it will only be the EU heads and the Great Resetters who will be allowed to fly, in chartered luxury jets of course.

Actually, I don’t think it makes sense to take a flight that’s so short, because the trip to and from the airport, and the wait to go through security, probably makes the trips as long or longer and more stressful than the train rides would be. And connector flights are unaffected by the ban. But still, banning the flights seems very ominous to me.

And apparently, Macron’s being criticized for not banning flights with up to four-hour train rides as the alternative.

These sorts of measures are really just technological virtue-signaling:

Critics have described the latest measures as “symbolic bans”.

Laurent Donceel, interim head of industry group Airlines for Europe (A4E), told the AFP news agency that “banning these trips will only have minimal effects” on CO2 output.

I don’t doubt it.

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Liberals want organic farming–no intensive nitrogen fertilization–along with an end to animal husbandry and banning of pretty much all effective herbicides and pesticides. All great ideas, if you don’t care about billions of people dying. Just ask anyone in Sri Lanka or the Netherlands.

Chris Morrison writes:

“The full horror of the ‘nitrogen’ war on agriculture is becoming more apparent every day. Food supplies around the world face collapse if the use of nitrogen fertiliser is severely restricted under Net Zero requirements. It is claimed that the fertiliser is warming the Earth and causing the climate to break down, as the by-product nitrous oxide is released into the atmosphere. In fact the entire global food supply is in danger of being trashed for the sake of what recent scientific work notes is almost unmeasurable 0.064°C warming per century.”

It’s a self-induced destruction, engineered by supposed “elites” and opposed by the rest, for the most part. When societies purposely harm themselves in obvious ways, it’s often under some idea or theory that dictates it necessary to achieve some greater ideal. Communism told people it was necessary to break a lot of eggs to make a tasty Communist omelette, and AGW alarmists feel they are tasked with saving the world.

Which for some reason reminds me of this:

In April 1856, 15-year-old Nongqawuse and her friend Nombanda, who was between the ages of 8 and 10, went to scare birds from her uncle’s crops in the fields by the sea at the mouth of the Gxarha River in the present day Wild Coast region of South Africa. When she returned, Nongqawuse told Mhlakaza that she had met the spirits of two of her ancestors. She claimed that the spirits had told her that the Xhosa people should destroy their crops and kill their cattle, the source of their wealth as well as food. Nongqawuse claimed that the ancestors who had appeared to them said:

The dead would arise.
All living cattle would have to be slaughtered, having been reared by contaminated hands.
Cultivation would cease.
New grain would have to be dug.
New houses would have to be built.
New cattle enclosures would have to be erected.
New milk sacks would have to be made.
Doors would have to be weaved with buka roots.
People must abandon witchcraft, incest, and adultery.
In return, the spirits would sweep all European settlers into the sea. The Xhosa people would be able to replenish the granaries and fill the kraals with more beautiful and healthier cattle…

In the aftermath of the crisis, the population of British Kaffraria dropped from 105,000 to fewer than 27,000 due to the resulting famine.

There actually was a cattle disease going around at the time, but it was killing far fewer cattle than ended up being slaughtered once belief in this vision spread.

You can read more about it here.

Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.

The post Societies that destroy themselves: the war on agriculture appeared first on The New Neo.

Of course, you don’t have to watch the whole thing to get a lot of the gist of it. I think it’s well worth listening to at least some of the discussion. I find Judith Curry to be one of the best scientists today speaking about the subject. So here it is:

The post Peterson and Curry appeared first on The New Neo.

So now we have the next step:

The Dutch government plans to buy and close down up to 3,000 farms near environmentally sensitive areas to comply with EU nature preservation rules…

The Netherlands is attempting to cut down its nitrogen pollution and will push ahead with compulsory purchases if not enough farms take up the offer voluntarily.

Farmers will be offered a deal “well over” the worth of the farm, according to the government plan that is targeting the closure of 2,000 to 3,000 farms or other major polluting businesses.

More here:

The state-backed “emission reduction” drive in the Netherlands is part of a more extensive EU climate campaign as Brussels doubles down on its radical globalist agenda despite a record rise in food and fuel prices across the Continent…

Faced with a government-backed climate onslaught, Dutch farmers are organizing themselves politically. They have fielded a new political party called the Boer Burger Beweging (BBB), or the Farmer-Citizen Movement.

Founded in 2019, the BBB has succeeded in creating a nationwide footprint. “In next year’s provincial elections, which will also decide representation in the Dutch senate, or Eerste Kamer, the BBB is fielding more than 300 candidates in all 12 provinces. In recent polls, the party ranks fourth of the 17 leading parties in the Netherlands,” the UK-based Guardian newspaper reported earlier this month.

There’s a similar farmers’ movement in Germany.

For quite some time I’ve mentioned that climate scientist Judith Curry is my favorite go-to person for what I consider sanity on climate-change issues. I haven’t seen her address the farm/nitrogen situation directly, but I recommend this recent interview with her on the entire subject of governments and climate in general. She’s so reasonable that it’s no wonder she was driven from academia:

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