“IMPLAUSIBLE” CLIMATE CHANGE

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has recently published its next generation of climate scenarios. The significant development is that it has now described its most extreme scenario (RCP8.5) as implausible and removed it from its scenario range, stating that the assumptions behind it describe an impossible future.

This matters to Northland because RCP8.5[*] has been widely used by central government and local councils to shape climate change policy. Those policies have imposed significant costs on consumers — including higher power and fuel prices — and restrictions on local property owners.

This represents a major shift in climate science and should serve as a wake-up call for climate policymakers at every level of government. Politicians now need to follow the IPCC’s lead: remove RCP8.5 from policy frameworks and review all policies that have been based on this implausible scenario.

The IPCC update also raises important questions for some in the legacy media. It challenges the mantra that “the science is settled.”

In November 2018, an editorial in Stuff, one of New Zealand’s largest news organisations, declared: “Quick! Save the Planet: We must confront climate change.”

The editorial claimed that the world’s leading climate scientists — the IPCC — had “recently laid out a new best-case scenario,” and that “with rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society we might be able to hold global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels.”

Stuff went on to state:

“We’ll feature a wide range of views as part of this project, but we won’t include climate change ‘scepticism’. Including denialism wouldn’t be ‘balanced’; it’d be a dangerous waste of time. The experts have debunked denialism, so now we’ll move on…Stuff accepts the overwhelming scientific consensus that climate change is real and caused by human activity. We welcome robust debate about the appropriate response to climate change, but do not intend to provide a venue for denialism. That applies equally to the stories we will publish… and to reader comments.”

With that, Stuff effectively closed the door on debate over the legitimacy of the UN’s climate measures. The question now is whether Stuff — and others in the media — will reopen the door to the possibility that science is never truly settled, or continue to deny it.

[* The Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) is a greenhouse gas concentration trajectory adopted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), based on different assumptions about population growth, energy use, technology, and policy.]