UN Climate Panel Quietly Admits Its Doomsday Climate Scenarios Were ‘Implausible’

The IPCC has published a new generation of climate scenarios – and buried in the fine print is a remarkable concession: the extreme warming pathways that dominated climate research, policy, and media coverage for decades were never actually plausible. It took a while to notice because almost no one in mainstream media bothered to report it.

“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has just published the next generation of climate scenarios,” Science policy analyst Roger Pielke Jr. wrote, calling it “big news” that “eliminated the most extreme scenarios that have dominated climate research over much of the past several decades.” 

The conclusion was unambiguous. “The IPCC and broader research community has now admitted that the scenarios that have dominated climate research, assessment and policy during the past two cycles of the IPCC assessment process are implausible. They describe impossible futures.”

Those “impossible futures” formed the backbone of a decade-plus of apocalyptic climate messaging – melting ice caps, submerged coastlines, mass extinctions, widespread crop failures, and global hunger, always around the corner, always demanding immediate, economy-reshaping action to avert a catastrophe that, it now turns out, the underlying science community had assigned to a category closer to science fiction than projection.

The new IPCC framework formally demotes its remaining “HIGH scenario” from expected outcome to “exploratory – a thought experiment, not a projection.”

That’s a significant institutional retreat. 

Pielke noted that the previous framework lacked “any systematic effort to evaluate plausibility of scenarios,” meaning the scariest pathways were able to dominate the policy debate for years without anyone in the room applying a basic reality check. 

What matters today is that the group with official responsibility for developing climate scenarios for the IPCC and broader research community has now admitted that the scenarios that have dominated climate research, assessment and policy during the past two cycles of the IPCC assessment process are implausible. They describe impossible futures.

Curiously, the revised framework was technically adopted back in 2021, but has only now filtered into public view as related technical and institutional changes caught up. And it’s fair to ask why. The policy consequences of those “impossible futures” were very real.

As the Daily Sceptic’s Chris Morrison opines; 

It cannot be over-emphasised how important this finding of implausibility is. It means that almost every fearmongering mainstream media climate headline and story that has been written over the last 15 years is junk. Of course it also explains why a growing band of sceptical commentators have refused to accept the political concept of ‘settled’ science and have engaged in widespread debunking. Shooting fish in a barrel is one way of describing this work. At times, with just a modicum of investigative scepticism, the stories can be seen as little more than an insult to average human intelligence.

When the RCP8.5 assumptions are loaded into computer models, they run politically-convenient red hot suggestions that the temperature in 2100 will rise by about 4°C from a 1850-1900 baseline – in other words, a rise of nearly 3°C in the next 80 years. Only the most deranged eco loons will claim such large short-term rises out loud, so the activist scientists quietly loaded garbage assumptions into their computers to arrive at their garbage-out Armageddon scares. The writing was on the wall for RCP8.5 last year when President Trump’s executive order titled ‘Restoring Gold Standard Science’ effectively banned the use of RCP8.5 for scientists on the United States federal payroll. It also noted one of the unrealistic RCP8.5 assumptions driving deliberate climate psychosis to be that end-of-century coal use will exceed estimates of recoverable reserves.

At the time, the climate researcher Zeke Hausfather dismissed the Trump Administration’s claims about RCP8.5 by stating that the research community had moved on. But Pielke has taken issue with this ‘nothing to see here’ claim. He states that from 2018 to 2021, Google Scholar reported 17,000 articles published using RCP8.5 compared with 16,900 in the next three year period. “Some shift,” he observed.

Again, those using less charitable words might note that the ultimate climate crackpipe has proved difficult to put down. A long and painful process of rehabilitation now seems likely.

RCP8.5 assumed high emissions of carbon dioxide leading to a radiative forcing (extra energy trapped in the Earth’s atmosphere) of 8.5 watts per square metre. The new pathways act as agreed guidelines for computer models that will then provide information for the IPCC’s forthcoming seventh assessment reports. Pielke has run the figures and estimates that the new high scenario will produce 3°C of warming by 2100, a reduction from 3.9°C but still an improbable 1.8°C rise in less than 80 years. Of course these new scenarios are just assumptions anyway, and on past observational evidence of atmospheric gas ‘saturation’ stretching back 600 million years they still grossly overestimate the warming effect of a few trace gases. Much higher levels of CO2 were the norm in the past in a complex, chaotic, non-linear and ultimately unmeasurable atmosphere. Climate scare bingo based on sightings in mainstream media of ‘scientists say’ will likely continue as long as an audience, albeit a diminishing one, still believes in the politicised agitprop of a ‘climate emergency’.

* * *

Climate change has been sold for years as an existential race against the clock, and despite decades of failed predictions, the alarmism hasn’t stopped.

In 2019, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) warned that if we don’t address the climate issue, the planet would be destroyed in just 12 years.

Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) warned in a video posted on social media in 2023 that climate change is the “greatest threat facing our country and all of humanity,” and warned that “If there is not bold, immediate, and united action by governments throughout the world, the quality of life that we are leaving our kids and future generations is very much in question.”

This regular framing of the need for immediate action has prompted Democrats to impose massive spending and sweeping mandates. Billions in taxpayer dollars have gone into green energy boondoggles, all justified by the promise of stopping catastrophic climate change. The same narrative fueled a wave of regulations that hit ordinary Americans with higher costs and fewer choices. In 2020, Gov. Gavin Newsom put that agenda into action, signing Executive Order N-79-20 to phase out gas-powered passenger vehicles by 2035 and medium- to heavy-duty vehicles by 2045. Two years later, Gov. Kathy Hochul followed through in New York with her own executive order, mandating that 35% of 2026 model-year cars sold in the state be “emissions-free,” scaling to 68% by 2030 and 100% by 2035. These Zero-Emission Vehicle mandates, along with aggressive federal emissions standards, were sold to the public as necessary responses to scenarios the IPCC now effectively acknowledges were describing things that could never happen.

Climate alarmism, of course, didn’t exist in a vacuum. It grew into a full-blown political and financial ecosystem – a machinery of grants, advocacy groups, media narratives, and regulatory agendas built on the premise that civilization had twelve to fifteen years to change course or face collapse. 

“The now-implausible upper-end scenarios […] are not just academic constructs used in esoteric research,” explains Pielke. “They are embedded in the policies and regulations of most of the world’s largest economies, found across the world’s most important multilateral institutions, and used in the climate stress tests that govern hundreds of billions of dollars in bank capital.”

That reality should spark real outrage. 

For years, the public was bombarded with worst-case scenarios that drove policy, justified massive spending, and steered hundreds of billions in capital – all under the banner of urgency and fear. If those dire projections were overstated or outright implausible, then the scale of the misallocation is staggering, and the media should be taking an interest in this story. Americans were told the clock was about to run out, and they were forced to pay accordingly. The fact that this reckoning hasn’t triggered a broader backlash says as much as the original alarmism ever did.