OPINION:
It seems the people squawking the loudest about “following the science” were not exactly following it.
In fact, it should not surprise you that alarmists on the left have been actively misrepresenting climate research and spreading misinformation to advance a leftist agenda.
Thankfully, one avenue for that trickery has been shut down, ending an era of scientific sleight of hand. Hopefully, this will force greater honesty in debates over environmental regulations.
The climate charade went like this: Scientists conjured worst-case, doomsday scenarios and used them to paint vivid pictures of melting polar ice caps, rising sea levels and flood-prone oceanfront property in Ohio.
With help from allies in the media, this far-fetched, climate-fear porn was mischaracterized as the likely result if the world continued “business as usual” in its use of natural resources for energy production.
This strategy to intentionally frighten people was used to promote leftist policy goals at the local, state and federal levels. It has also been the basis for dangerous climate litigation that now threatens to undermine the entire American economy.
Yet it was never true, and it all came from the United Nations.
Since 2014, a U.N. panel on climate change has used different scenarios, or Representative Concentration Pathways, to predict future levels of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere. The RCPs were created by making increasingly severe assumptions about the future. Together, they provide a spectrum of climate severity that culminates in RCP8.5, which forecasts the most dangerous conditions.
Yet RCP8.5 contemplated a future that simply does not exist, since it made ridiculous assumptions for its forecast. For example, it accepted the proposition that worldwide coal consumption would increase fivefold by the year 2100, even though that would mean burning more coal than Earth contains.
Again, scientists and reporters not only widely cited the predictions of RCP8.5 but also portrayed them as the likely outcome if world governments failed to adopt stringent environmental regulations.
Yet, in a move that surprised many, the United Nations abruptly backed off RCP8.5 in April, announcing that it would no longer be included in the organization’s climate modeling.
The U.N. scientists now describe the future envisioned by these extreme projections as “implausible” and suggest, weakly, that this is because some nations have pursued renewable energy and climate policies.
Nonsense. They scrapped the cataclysmic scenario because it was obvious it would never happen.
Did they think that no one would ever notice that it is impossible to burn more coal than exists?
It is undoubtedly a good thing that RCP8.5 (and a couple of other related U.N. forecasts) are gone, but plenty of damage has already been done.
In a major climate case now pending before the Supreme Court, officials in Boulder, Colorado, argue that energy companies should pay for the costs of climate mitigation policies the locality says it has been — or will be — forced to adopt.
They assessed their supposed future damages using the extreme forecast under RCP8.5, which we now know the United Nations considers complete fiction.
With this lawsuit and others like it, leftists are clear in their intent to destroy our domestic energy supply and, therefore, the entire U.S. economy.
Other litigation features climate anxiety whipped up by the dire predictions. Indeed, a cottage industry on the left has been churning out lawsuits starring child plaintiffs who have been scared out of their wits that the world is about to end.
Children as young as 2 have been listed as plaintiffs in climate lawsuits, and the complaints sound as if someone read them too many ghost stories right before bedtime. The youngsters report nightmares, panic attacks and anxieties about having their own children on a planet they have been convinced is dying.
It is no coincidence that Greta Thunberg burst onto the climate protest scene in 2018 at age 15, for she had been about 11 when RCP8.5 was introduced. No doubt she was severely affected by the left’s fever-dream vision of the future.
Ms. Thunberg is known mostly for her “How dare you?” line in a 2019 speech at a U.N. climate event, but another remark speaks to the terror the left planted in her brain.
“You have stolen my dreams and my childhood,” she said, aiming those words at world leaders she believed were failing to act on leftist climate policy.
Yet Ms. Thunberg and her fellow activists should really be angry at the U.N. scientists who told the entire world a fictional horror story for a dozen years and then one day said, “Never mind.”
Recall this the next time they try to sell you another doomsday tale and remember how the last one ended.
• Tim Murtaugh is a Washington Times columnist and founder of Line Drive Public Affairs. He served as a senior adviser on the 2024 Trump campaign and as communications director on the 2020 Trump campaign.
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