As future historians write the story of the great climate science fraud of the turn of the millennium, the central role of the RCP8.5 (business as usual) scenario, much discussed in recent IPCC reports, will be obvious to all. This ‘pathway’ has for years contaminated climate model projections with wild and implausible claims about CO2 emissions and temperature increases. Apparent Net Zero activists have published a huge number of scientific papers containing this pathway, and their ‘scientists say’ climate psychosis-inducing fairy tales are being promoted by blind editors in the mainstream press. Science writer Roger Pielke Jr. states that RCP8.5 is “fake” – historians will probably conclude that most knew it was fake, but the Net Zero addiction was too strong to be abandoned.
Dr Pielke explains in a recent Substack article that by “fake” he means that the emissions trajectory is already far from reality. To prove his point, he offers the 2021 evidence contained in the Burgess et al. paper highlighted in the chart below.
According to Pielke, the gap between the black arrow (RCP8.5) and the blue arrow (reality) shows that RCP8.5 is not only unlikely but impossible. Pielke says that the gap between RCP8.5 and reality has only widened since the article was published. RCP8.5 also assumes that the Earth’s temperature will rise by possibly 4 degrees Celsius in less than 80 years, which is quite a question, given that the temperature has barely risen by 0.25 degrees Celsius in at least the last 25 years. President Trump’s recent executive order “Restoring Gold Standard Science” banned the use of RCP8.5 by scientists on the US federal payroll because it uses highly improbable assumptions, such as that end-of-century coal use will exceed estimates of recoverable reserves.
Climate scientist Zeke Hausfather dismissed the Trump administration’s claims about RCP8.5, saying that the scientific community has moved on, Pielke said. But Hausfather’s “there’s nothing to see here” is wrong, Pielke said. Between 2018 and 2021, Google Scholar will report 17,000 articles published using RCP8.5, he reports. Between 2022 and 2025, the same source will report 16,900 infringing articles. “Quite a change,” he notes.
Of course, as Pielke shows, the use of RCP8.5 and its later, similar counterpart SSP5-8.5 is far from over, and in fact seems to be an increasingly important way to support the dwindling Net Zero fantasy. This is particularly true in the mainstream media, where a truly appalling example of its use was a recent story by the BBC’s Mark Poynting. This rising doomsday star recently sent children crying to bed by claiming that ‘scientists say’ that coastal areas and other countries could be hit by several metres of sea-level rise if global temperatures rise by three-tenths of a degree Celsius. This magnificent effort by yet another climate activist on the BBC payroll was achieved by stretching the limits much further than even SSP5-8.5 predicted. The poynting was based on a paper on polar ice melting, which predicted a rise of between 12 and 52 centimetres by 2100. Poynting happened to come across a claim in the document that the IPCC said it could not rule out (albeit with “low certainty”) that sea level rise by 2300 could be more than 15 metres. This is how it is done, the job is done and the first paragraph strongly argues that sea levels will rise by several metres “even if the ambitious targets of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius are met”.
In 2021, Roger Pielke teamed up with Justin Ritchie to argue that the use of RCP8.5 was due to requirements for computer air conditioning models to have a high signal-to-noise ratio. In other words, although the duo don’t exactly put it in those terms, the manipulated models used for political propaganda had to over-emphasise the warming of greenhouse gases from burning hydrocarbons compared to natural climate variability. The lack of real-world credibility is said to have led to misleading political effects.
And some! The history of the great climate science hoax and its role in the collectivist effort to impose Net Zero on the global population gives RCP8.5 a starring role. But it also blames those who botched the scientific process, invented the idea of “settled” science and tried to demonise any research that didn’t blame man for the weather – look at the BBC, but you were only slightly worse than most of the mainstream media (we just had to pay for all the nonsense). It can also be blamed on government funded meteorological operations around the world using unnaturally heated stations to produce temperature rises and countless new ‘records’. No one in the polite mainstream brought out all the fake data because it would have opened Pandora’s box, which was in no one’s political interest. Of course, we cannot forget all those university employees who added the word ‘science’ to describe their unscientific work and thus greatly helped their employment prospects, not to mention their grant-gathering opportunities. There will also be a big shout-out to all those billionaires who have spent billions to produce a report aimed at everyone from tame journalists to defenceless schoolchildren.
But if your correspondent is still around to write the book, I reserve a special place in hell for a group of Liberal Democrat, Labour and Conservative lawmakers. These 200 dangerous left-wing MPs supported a private member’s bill in the House of Commons earlier this year which, if passed, would have reduced the use of all domestic and imported hydrocarbons to barely 10% within a decade. It would not even have been enough to run emergency services, let alone heat and feed a population of nearly 70 million. This is an extreme case, although many politicians seem to be hoping for measures that are likely to lead to economic and social collapse. But it is a shining example of how far the madness really went in the first quarter of the 21st century.