$16 trillion; and to create a blueprint for huge, but wholly unneeded, new government outlays that have zero effects on global temperatures and unsurprisingly end up in the pockets of the Democratic machine.
“The new framework has eliminated the most extreme scenarios that have dominated climate research over much of the past several decades — specifically, RCP8.5, SSP5-8.5, and SSP3-7.0,” says Pielke. “This is an absolutely huge development in climate science which will have lasting impacts across research and policy.”
It turns out that the most alarming possibilities put forth by the IPCC — the same ones used by those among us who insist we have only a few years to save Earth from global warming and have to turn over our lives to their policymaking whims — simply aren’t plausible.
It’s hard to overstate the importance of this shift, because, says Pielke, “tens of thousands of research papers have been — and continue to be — published using these scenarios,” while “a similar number of media headlines have amplified their findings, and governments and international organization have built these implausible scenarios into policy and regulation.”
It was all, he adds, “built on a foundation of sand.”
It’s lamentable that the political grift extended to the science, thereby corrupting it. It should not have taken so long to “discover” that those claims were bogus. But there was money to be made in the scientific community by ignoring the truth and forecasting disaster.
That’s why science is never settled. Unless they have been corrupted, scientists are expected to challenge each other, not sign onto “consensus” documents that are based on invalid scientific estimates.
Otherwise, it’s not really science at all — it’s merely a political agenda masquerading as science with great financial benefits.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
I & I Editorial Board
The Issues and Insights Editorial Board has decades of experience in journalism, commentary and public policy.
