CDN readers know all about the RCP8.5 Scam, in which the IPCC runs impossibly-exaggerated emission scenarios through their too-hot models and generate headline-grabbing predictions of climate catastrophe, while the reasonable models run with moderate scenarios show climate change will be small and manageable. The DOE Team also had the measure of this trick and in Chapter 3.2 they talk about the numbers. And they show that the IPCC has been at it for a long time.
While it is true that modelers need emission scenarios to have something to look at, there is no excuse for always overstating things. It turns out the IPCC has a long history of releasing a group of scenarios that range from the plausible to the ridiculously exaggerated. So then they can pick one in the middle and it will only be somewhat ridiculous. Except in the case of RCP8.5 when they just set the dial to 11 and used the most ridiculous one of all.
The DOE team point out that climate scientists started calling RCP8.5 a “business-as-usual” scenario even though it was never meant to be anything of the sort. Instead it was explicitly conceived as an extreme outlier case. But virtually all the “climate change impacts” you hear about in the press are based on RCP8.5 or its newer iteration, the co-called SSP5-85. So they all go straight into the garbage around here.
The DOE team also discuss the carbon cycle, including the curious fact that no matter how much CO2 emissions increase, nature absorbs about half of it. So nature absorbed about half of human emissions in 1970, and then many years later when emissions had doubled, it still absorbed half. So maybe that means that the extra CO2 leads to more greening which then leads to more CO2 sequestration. Or maybe not. How this works is a bit of a mystery. As the DOE report shows, the leading carbon cycle models have estimates of annual CO2 uptake that differ by a factor of seven. But not to worry, they can still predict the future with great precision, because the science is settled. And next week we’ll dive into the settled science of climate sensitivity.
RPC 8.5 also contemplates a world where everyone has benefited from enormous economic growth due to the use of inexpensive and abundant energy.
Comment from Chris Selly's Dec. 9/25 article in NP.
" It will be remembered as the greatest mass delusion in the history of the world that carbon dioxide, the life of plants, was considered for a time to be a deadly poison." Richard Lindzen, Ph.D., Atmospheric Physicist and Professor Emeritus, MIT.
" There is no scientific basis for the lurid scenarios that have been used to terrify our children and many scientifically illiterate adults as well." William Happer, Ph.D., Nuclear Physicist and Professor Emeritus, Princeton.
" I'll come right out and say it: it has nothing to do with CO2." John Clauser, Ph.D., Nobel Prize winner in Physics and Professor Emeritus, Stanford.
Wake up Selly. The grift will continue until you stop being a "scientifically illiterate adult". My suggestion is you interview any one of the above scientists and then flush out the Royal Society in Ottawa. They've been hiding in the weeds for a very long time. Do your job.