It’s nice when something you knew was a fraud all along turns out to be a fraud, but it’s even nicer when the people perpetrating the fraud admit it was a fraud all along.
“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has just published the next generation of climate scenarios,” science policy analyst Roger Pielke Jr wrote late last week, and in what he called “big news,” the new framework “eliminated the most extreme scenarios that have dominated climate research over much of the past several decades.”
So the oceans aren’t about to boil off or freeze over or whatever the current scare story is?
Exactly: “The IPCC and broader research community has now admitted that the scenarios that have dominated climate research, assessment and policy during the past two cycles of the IPCC assessment process are implausible. They describe impossible futures.”
This is important because the IPCC’s changes resulted in “an update to the Science Based Targets initiative’s rules eliminates the need for steep emission cuts by 2030,” Trellis reported on Friday. In other words, even the people committed to radically reduced carbon emissions now say we don’t need to radically reduce carbon emissions to save the world or whatever.
Without getting too technical — you can read Pielke’s full report for that, should you feel the need to go shoulder-deep in the weeds — the upshot is that the previous frameworks lacked “any systematic effort to evaluate plausibility of scenarios.” Now, however, “the new HIGH scenario is exploratory — a thought experiment, not a projection.”
My guess is that the IPCC still includes the non-scientific, scary-sounding “HIGH scenario” because otherwise the money might dry up.
Pielke added that “users of climate models and model output based on legacy scenarios will now face decisions about if and how they’d like to realign with the latest scientific understandings versus continuing to rely on outdated research.”
We’ll see how that works out.
The new IPCC framework actually dates back to 2021, but is only now becoming “news” because a bunch of slow-moving pieces have finally lined up. That’s just how science works.
But Pielke’s analysis is a week old, and the only way I learned about it was thanks to a Toby Young post on X — he’s editor-in-chief of the UK’s Daily Sceptic — that PJ Media’s own Charlie Martin found.
Why, it’s almost as though the mainstream media doesn’t want to cover stories like this one.
But for once, I don’t digress.
Even though it might be “purely anecdotal, the Daily Sceptic’s Chris Morrison believes that even the notoriously scaremongering BBC “seems to have moderated its wilder climate stories of late, with the ‘Climate’ topic on its News site relegated to the second tier of subjects,” effectively demoting climate scares to “rubbing shoulders with the picture gallery and the dumbed-down ‘Newsbeat’ offering.”
So while today’s news is good — maybe even great — it does leave me with two questions.
The first it whether the American news media will follow the BBC’s lead and stop scaring people with end-of-the-world stories.
The second is what the Left will use to scare us with next.
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