Revved up by the orgy of climate alarmism opportunities supplied by the recent heatwave, the Met Office has taken to making apocalyptic forecasts for the year 2070. In the Telegraph, Matt Ridley takes the national forecaster to task for basing these doomy predictions on modelling even the IPCC rejects. Here’s an excerpt.
The Met Office exists to forecast the weather. But increasingly it seems bored by the day job so it likes to lecture us about climate change. And here it seems to have been embarrassingly duped by activists. Go on its climate pages and you find a forecast for the year 2070, that summers will be between one and six degrees warmer and “up to” 60% drier, depending on the region. A lot of wriggle room in those caveats, note.
Then it admits: “We base these changes on the RCP8.5 high emissions scenario.” Aha! Unbelievably, shockingly, this national forecasting body has chosen as its base case for the future of weather a debunked, highly implausible set of assumptions about the world economy that was never intended to be used this way.
RCP8.5 is one of five projected futures for the world economy this century, dreamt up by economists. Here is what it assumes. First, the world becomes addicted to coal, burning 10 times – yes, 10 times! – as much coal in 2100 as we did in 2000 and even using coal to make fuel for aircraft and cars. Yes: that is really what it says. It projects that fully half of all the world’s energy will be supplied by coal in 2100.
Second, it assumes that the world population will have swelled to 12 billion people by 2100, way more than any demographer thinks is likely. Third, it assumes that innovation will somehow dry up so there’s hardly any new technology to make our lives more fuel-efficient – and we won’t even try to cut emissions. In short, this scenario is barking mad.
Don’t take my word for it. Here’s what Carbon Brief, an activist website, has to say: “The creators of RCP8.5 had not intended it to represent the most likely ‘business as usual’ outcome. … Its subsequent use as such represents something of a breakdown in communication between energy systems modellers and the climate modelling community.”
Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that RCP8.5 should not be used as a forecast. And here’s its chief creator, Keywan Riahi: “I wished I would have been clearer with what I meant by ‘business as usual’.”
Worth reading in full.
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