By Jo Nova
It’s time to move the goalposts to rescue some reputations
We always knew this day would come. The moment when history gets rewritten so The Blob can pretend their life and death battle for climate change was not scientific Voodoo, and a total waste of twenty years and a thousand billion dollars.
If we move all the goalposts, the Paris Agreement is looking good, even though man-made emissions are rising, and almost no one is meeting their targets.
Watch the agitprop in action — firstly they pretend this is about maths — “the numbers are in” as if they have evidence and can count to four. But every number is completely invented, totally elastic and all of it was modeled, and none of it has happened. They’re just saying (and lying) that things could have been a lot worse, but phew, the Paris Agreement is working:
Has the Paris Agreement started to work? The numbers are in
By Nick O Malley, The Sydney Morning Herald
As global heat records keep tumbling, a new analysis shows the Paris climate treaty is having an impact, with warming on track to reach 2.6 degrees if nations meet their commitments, rather than 4 degrees as was predicted before the agreement was signed in 2016.
O’Malley is trying to gaslight the audience into thinking that the IPCC was “predicting 4 degrees C” as the most likely outcome when the range stretched from 0.3°C up to 4.8°C, and all the talk at the time was about staying below 2 degrees with an aspirational target of 1.5°C.
The 4 degree extreme predictions came only from the absurd “RCP 8.5 scenario” — where the whole world flew Concordes to work every day and CO2 reached 936ppm. (But even die-hard modelers like Gavin Schmidt and Zeke Hausfather now agree this was an unlikely and unrealistically extreme outcome.)
But nine years later, after coal use hits record highs and renewables projects are collapsing, there’s not even a hint that global CO2 levels have slowed at all — yet The Blob cheer-squad hails a modeled 2.6 degrees future as a success (if everyone keeps their word which they never do).
And since the 2.6 degree “future” is calculated with models we know don’t work, every single part of this might as well be chicken entrails.
If man-made emissions mattered at all, this is not what “success” looks like:
Back in 2016, the goal was 2 °C. Later, when it looked like the disasters weren’t coming in fast enough, they decided that 1.5 °C of warming was still a terrible thing. Now they’re celebrating 2.6 °C. Only in climate politics can every miss be a win.
REFERENCES
IPCC AR5 Working Group I, Summary for Policymakers, page 23. Table SPM.2
Z. Hausfather, and G.P. Peters, “Emissions – the ‘business as usual’ story is misleading”, Nature, vol. 577, pp. 618-620, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-00177-3