Facts are stubborn things, and they always come out, sooner or later. In the case of climate panic-mongering, it's been more on the "later" side, but these facts are nevertheless making themselves known. Some people in the legacy media, who have been beating the climate apocalypse drum for some years now, are having to admit that the worst-case scenarios everyone was pushing to try to enact policies and laws that would reduce our comfortable lives to appease the climate gods were based on bad input.
Bad inputs, of course, lead to bad outputs, but bad inputs can be ignored when there's an agenda to be served; at least, until the people who originated the bad inputs, in a seeming attack of conscience, admit that their work was in error. And now a reporter from Vox, Bryan Walsh, writing in a publication known to engage in climate scoldery, is having to back down somewhat from former apocalyptic claims.
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.
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.”
There are still some problems with Mr. Walsh's comments here; "clean energy" still is, in the long run, costlier than traditional sources when everything is factored in. It's also less reliable, intermittent, and low-density; all the problems I've been pointing out for years now. But yes, emissions have been dropping in the developed world, as much due to improved fuel processing and greater efficiencies as anything else.
Here, though, we're concerned with the legacy media basing years of breathless climate panic-mongering on something, namely, RCP 8.5, that has now been retracted by the very people who first postulated it. Here's the zinger:
Scenarios serve as a critical tool in climate change analysis. Defined as plausible alternative descriptions of how the future may develop based on a coherent set of assumptions, they are used by different research communities to explore potential future avenues of socio-economic conditions, assess the effects of different drivers of climate change, characterize future climatic conditions, and assess impacts of climate change as well as adaptation and mitigation responses. As such, scenarios are also useful to bridge across different research communities.
Granted, the language of science is always tentative. That's how science works; it's always tentative, subject to re-examination when new data is uncovered. But even for a scientific paper, there's a lot of wiggle room in that statement. First, these scenarios aren't based on direct observations; at best, they are based on simulated extrapolations of observations and data. And assumptions, well, we all know what they say about assumptions.
But science is, or should be, self-correcting. That would seem to be what is happening here, and I have to say, in this field of study, that's refreshing.
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The biggest part of this problem, though, isn't about the science. It's about the reporting of that science. Mr. Walsh continues:
RCP 8.5 was as much a climate journalism story as it was a climate science one. In 2017, the writer David Wallace-Wells published “The Uninhabitable Earth” in New York magazine. It was probably the most widely read piece of climate journalism of the last decade, and it was built almost entirely on RCP 8.5 projections.
For years now, we have been subjected to hectoring about our lifestyles from the climate scolds. They have made dire predictions that haven't come to pass. They've made demands on all of us - that we must give up air conditioning, that we must give up driving, that we must forgo cheeseburgers for bugburgers and tofu, and that we must give up our suburban and rural homes to cram ourselves into rabbit-warren 15-minute cities.
It's all falling apart now. Oh, the scolds won't give up overnight. Even in this case, there is an element of "Oh, things weren't as bad as we thought, but we still need to put up more solar panels and windmills."
And, you know, I'll take it. For now. There are still arguments to be made, there are still fights to be fought, but facts, as I said at the outset, are stubborn things, and they will, always, come to light, sooner or later.
