The prevailing climate change narrative took a big hit in recent days, as scientists who comprise the United Nations’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are backing away from more outlandish climate predictions for the 21st century.
Extreme forecasts of rising temperatures of 4 to 5 degrees, the scientists wrote in the journal Geoscientific Model Development, “have become implausible.” That means predictions of rapidly growing carbon emissions and higher temperatures, supposedly leading to fast-rising sea levels, floods, crop failures, and even human extinction scenarios, are finally being jettisoned.
This long-standing climate change narrative, always a house of cards designed to scare societies into submission, is collapsing — first gradually, now suddenly, to borrow a phrase from Ernest Hemingway.
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Turns out even climate scientists on the U.N. dole have a modicum of self-respect such that they can no longer defend such lunatic predictions that were never plausible from the start.
“For the 21st century, this range [of future climate scenarios] will be smaller than assessed before,” they wrote. As a way of saving face, their scaling back of climate change doom comes from “[lower] costs of renewables, the emergence of climate policy, and recent emission trends.” In fact, these scientists, in long-winded, technical jargon, are eating crow.
Do they, or anyone else, really believe a few windmills and solar panels scattered about like a handful of microscopic specks on the planet’s landmass — which itself is only 30% of the globe — affected anything?
These longtime scare tactics from the IPCC and its echo chamber of universities, NGOs, and government bureaucracies certainly had their effect, especially on young people. It reminds me of an encounter 18 months ago while attending the U.N. COP29 Climate Summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, as part of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow delegation.
CFACT President Craig Rucker and I took some time to visit the Old City. At this tourist enclave of Baku, we met three American college students from North Carolina who were also attending the conference. We struck up a conversation about climate change.
There was no arguing or acrimony, just a pleasant back-and-forth. Craig explained to them in his affable but thorough manner that the impact of climate change is emphatically not what the U.N. or the outgoing Biden administration claimed. It’s not an “existential threat,” climate doomsday predictions going back nearly 40 years have never panned out, it’s OK to have children, and so on.
Among the three students, one (the male) was not buying it, a second (female) had an unsure, quizzical expression, while the third (female) had a palpable countenance of relief, like the weight of the world was lifted from her. All three had been bamboozled on climate issues for their entire lives, perhaps starting with Saturday morning cartoons, to hypocritical Hollywood actors, corporate grifters seeking government contracts, and charlatan college professors drinking the same Kool-Aid.
With this latest from these IPCC scientists, the prevailing narrative from all these institutions should be coming unglued, as it can no longer withstand the scientific, planetary, and human realities before us.
The North Pole and Antarctica still have massive ice buildup in their respective winters. The Atlantic Ocean will not subsume Miami or the Obamas third (or fourth?) home on the shoreline of Martha’s Vineyard. New technologies like artificial intelligence and military hardware cannot operate now or ever on wind and solar power. Liquefied natural gas is abundant and spreading widely across the globe, courtesy of growing U.S. exports, and carbon-free (assuming it matters) nuclear energy is slowly but inexorably making a comeback.
The higher price of gas due to America’s war with Iran is also a tell. Americans detest gasoline at $4.50 per gallon, Californians hate it even more at $6-plus. This war has an end date, hopefully sooner rather than later, after which global oil markets will flow and gasoline prices will drop. But climate policies for so-called green energy can only survive and expand in a high-priced world of oil and gas, which is where the climate lobby wants it to stay indefinitely.
Except for the most craven, gullible politicians, most of the remaining elected officials are not going to tolerate — and risk blame for — permanently skyrocketing energy prices from imposing climate change energy policies, knowing their current unpopularity with the public.
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Of course, the climate change industrial complex, spearheaded by the IPCC, is not going to disappear nor admit they were peddling climate nonsense. The beat will go on, but their credibility and decades of scaremongering under the false flag of “science” should never again be taken seriously.
Regarding that college student from North Carolina who felt enormous relief that climate change was not a threat to her future, I hope millions more will feel likewise as this colossal lie of climate change Armageddon continues to collapse under its own weight.
Peter Murphy is a senior fellow at the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, a Washington, D.C.-based organization in support of free-market, technological solutions to energy and environmental challenges.