It turns out the science wasn't settled after all | Hour 2

What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to thepeteclendershow dot com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button, get every episode for free, write to your smartphone or tablet, and again, thank you so much for your support. Alrighty, so what if I told you that most of the doomsday stories and predictions about climate change were based off of a model that it never should have been based off of. Well, I actually did tell you that, I said, Okay, I may have mentioned this the other and not may I did? I mentioned this I think earlier in the week or maybe last week. I didn't go in depth on it. I just made a mention of this thing called the RCP eight point five, which we all know all about it. So I won't even describe what the rcpaight point five is because everybody knows what it is, right, No, it stands for Representative Concentration Pathway eight point five. Okay, this is a piece over at persuasion dot Com by an individual named Quicko or Quicico. Quico Toro, a contributing editor at Persuasion and also a the director of Climate Repair at the Anthroposcine Institute or Anthroposcene. I don't know how it's pronounced. So this is a climate guy, Okay, this is a writer, a journalism or whatever in this website, persuasion dot Com. From what I mean, I. Get their emails and stuff, and usually it's from the left. It strikes me as a left of center publication. Okay, but I read this stuff, so you don't have to. Okay, But here's the key that the fact that we are all still alive after net neutrality, but really after all of the predictions that we would be dead because the oceans were going to boil and turn into like these massive tidal waves that just you know, wipe out the entire East Coast and the only thing left in America is like the Colorado Rockies, Like that's it, you know. So we're all still alive and all of these predictions have not come to pass. Even Al Gore, the famed inventor of the Internet, he made these predictions of the utter destruction of the planet you know, twenty five thirty years ago, and none of those predictions came true either. Again, we were all supposed to be dead. So again, well unless you were killed by net neutrality. So now we are finding out the reason why is because you see, there was this model, the RCP eight point five, and it never should have been used the way it's been used. So that's our bad as some climate journalismers totally. Are bad, you know, but we kind of did use it. It was the worst case scenario, and now it is officially dead. Last month, UN scientists announced publicly what climate researchers have known for years. Wait a minute, Climate researchers have known this for years, that the most extreme climate change pathway is so implausible that it really shouldn't be part of the climate debate. Really, climate researchers have known this for years, Because that's not what I've heard. All I've heard is death and destruction. The culprit known as the Representative Concentration Pathway eight point five or the RCP eight point five, suffered a peculiarly nasty case of context collapse. A tool developed by a bunch of nerds was set loose on the world, only to be wildly misinterpreted, generating mass confusion and buckets of activist dollars on the way to thoroughly disfiguring our climate debate. This is one of those things, now it can be told, right, one of those types of stories, the thing that we all kind of thought was crap to begin with, and now it can be told that it was crap. Now. I know we may have called you a denier for thirty years and accused you of wanting everybody to drink dirty water and breathe in dirty air, and you're just denying all of this stuff. And you hate Gaya Earth, you hate all of your fellow human beings. You want all of your children to die early because of climate change. Right, you don't want to spend a trillion dollars because your cheap skate. I know we may have said all of this stuff about you and to you for thirty years, but you know, water under the bridge, So that was our bad. Sorry, we were using the catastrophic model this whole time, and we should not have been. But now the UN is mothballing the RCP eight point five, and he says, Quiko Toro says, good riddance the RCP refers to the amount of added solar energy that the atmosphere will trap by the year twenty one hundred, Okay, specifically eight point five watts per square meter. That's very high, likely to bring about a shocking five degrees of global warming above pre industrial levels. RCP eight point five was the kind of climate scenario lurking behind Greta Thunberg's accusation back in September twenty nineteen during her speech at the UN Climate Action Summit when she said, quote in the beginning of a miss extinction, it's the kind of pathway young people in England were thinking about when they decided they needed to launch extinction rebellion. These are the people that throw paint on works of art, that glue their hands to museum pieces, or stick their hands into poured concrete, not realizing that that burns. Right. It's been a fundraising bonanza for climate activist groups, the main player in every single alarmist climate critique that you have read over the last fifteen years, and it's been the default setting for literally thousands of climate science papers. In fact, Google scholar lists more than thirty thousand of such studies published since the year twenty eighteen. So in seven years, thirty thousand studies using the RCPA point five. Now, the story of the RCPA point five is ultimately the story of what goes wrong when people convinced they are defending. The science and data. Because it's a mantra, you know, right in the Holy Church of Covid. Okay, when they believe they are defending the science, catastrophically misunderstand how science works, and when politicized activists glom onto legitimate scientific tools and insist on ramming the round peg of probabilistic forecasting into the square hole of fundraising emails. So mistakes were made. Okay, sorry, I mean some mistakes got made, but let's move on from that. You know, it's still very bad. Look all right, the eight point five. Okay, we may have like oversold the risks here, but the risks are still really bad. Everybody. Okay, So instead of all of us dying like five years ago, now, we're going to be dying in like ten years from now. So you know, hit that donate button, send five dollars to say you love the earth. He gives an example. Let's say you're designing a highway bridge and you have to figure out where the structure's weak points are, what would cause it to break. So you want to simulate what would happen in extreme circumstances. Right, And so he says, let's. Say you put two hundred and fifty fully loaded m one Abram's battle tanks onto the bridge at the same time. Not because there's any kind of conceivable scenario where you would have two hundred and fifty tanks on the bridge at the same time, but because modeling that allows you to gain valuable knowledge about the bridge and its load bearing capacity. Right. That's basically the original intent of the RCP eight point five. See, it was just to test the extreme. We never meant for these activists and politicians to use it to like bankrupt nations. I mean again, mistakes were made. Let's just move on, everybody, Let's just move on. You know, stories are powerful. They help us make sense of things, to understand experiences. Stories connect us to the people of our past while trend sending generations. They help us process the meaning of life, and our stories are told through images and videos. Preserve your stories with Creative Video started in nineteen ninety seven and Minhill, North Carolina. 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Reading about the death of RCP A point five at persuasion dot com by quickco Toro, who says, if you had tried to explain that the eight point five model was the worst case scenario and should not have been the foundation for further research, you shouldn't build models off of the eight point five because it is the worst case scenario. If you try to explain all of this, this was a massive misinterpretation of what the IPCC was doing well, you got slammed as a climate denialist. RCP eight point five was never a plausible pathway for human emissions. This was well understood in the scientific community right from the start. Right from the start. The original paper that laid all of this out in twenty eleven, it was called the name of the paper was called RCP eight point five a scenario of comparatively high greenhouse gas emissions, and the modelers said, this is what would happen if you combined very high population growth with virtually no technological change towards cleaner power. In practice, it was a world where the population grew to twelve billion by the year twenty one hundred, and the economy grew very fast, and the majority of global energy needs were met by burning coal. That was the model. Massive population growth, massive economic growth, and massive growth in coal burning power generation. Back in twenty eleven, researchers reckoned that rcpaight point five sat near the ninth twentieth percentile of the no policy baseline scenarios, meaning that roughly nine out of ten futures with no climate policy at all would still produce less warming. It's become clear that this risk is not where the world is headed. Populations are growing considerably less quickly right and now the UN projects global population to peak at ten point three billion in the mid twenty eighties and then to actually start declining. The energy story is even more striking. In twenty twenty three, solar and win made up ninety one percent of net new global power capacity. Additions, fossil fuels contributed just six percent, the lowest level ever recorded. He goes on to say, if we lived in a more rational world RCP eight point five, alarmism would have ended. In twenty seventeen. That was the year when the energy economists Justin Richie and Hati Dala la Labi. I think it's how they pronounced that published research showing that ourcpaight point five was not just implausible, it was straight up impossible. Twenty seventeen. There's just not enough minable coal in the world to bring us to this level of emissions. Even if we were satisfying all of the new energy needs with coal, which is definitely not what we're doing, you would have to take all of the coal off of the planet, and even then there wouldn't be enough. That should have been the end of the story, but of. Course it was not because by the time Richie and Dalata Bla La Bodies paper came out, too many activist groups had built business plans around scaring the Bajeebis out of people on the basis of highly emotive RCP eight point five inspired catastrophist research. I don't know about you. I am shocked. I am absolutely shocked. Scientists, for their part, quickly realized that research based on the RCP eight point five would give rise to flashier findings yes right, which would have a better chance of being accepted by prestigious journals. RCP eight point five amplified their results and turned journal editors heads. And besides, everybody else is doing it. Those inflated findings, he says, then got recycled into activist discourse and fundraising pitches, creating a hermetically sealed system where the science and the activism fed back on one another in an unbreakable loop of messed up incentives. This model replicates across so many other areas of study. Basically, if there are any political policy implications for any kind of science research, there are built in incentives for the people that are seeking the grants to catastrophize the worst scenarios, and then the activists glom onto those findings, push them out, raise money, whip up fear, which then creates the feedback loop and they just feed one another. This is not new. I have been saying this for twenty years. I could see this twenty years ago, like okay, and I'm not some super smart guy like I could just see, Wait a minute, we're supposed to be dead in what kind of timeframe are you talking about? Because I kind of feel like we would start seeing the results of this already and we have it. And also is the juice worth the squeeze? Right? This is one of those questions that I find myself asking in many different contexts. But if you're going to ask the developed world, and particularly the undeveloped world, if you're going to ask them to sacrifice their energy production to save Gaya Earth, what's the cost? What's the trade off. One degree increase globally in exchange for you know, not being in mud huts burning our pooh. I'm thinking most people take that deal. I do. I think most people would take that deal. RCP eight point five, which had started life as a useful climate modeling tool had subtly morphed into an engine for disinformation. The ideology it spawned climate catastrophism, captured the Democratic Party and locked center left elites in a disinformation chamber of their own, making a calamity any way you slice it. The scientists preparing the IPCC's next assessment report have decided to now pull the plug on RCP eight point five. It is dead. Good riddens Indeed, Kevin says, Pete, I think Google needs to give you a job because it's oh as its word pronunciation voice. Your pronunciations of names is impeccable. Thank you, I appreciate that. I work very hard on the pronunciations, Baine says, using the lawyer client relationship metaphor, this should not surprise us. The incredible, wildly off worst case scenario of RCP eight point five. Even in a guilty slam dunk murder trial, the defendant has a lawyer slash scientist. That's the metaphor. Here, the lawyer is the scientist. If you listen to any opening statement in a trial, you get to thinking, whoa this lawyer scientist? Sure sounds confident. I'm worried. And then the actual trial begins and the evidence just does not line up with the opening statement. But remember, the lawyer scientist represents the client. He has to do everything he can to get his defendant off. And if you, and if just one juror has doubts, mission accomplished, mistrial declared. This is the lawyer world we live in. Facts don't matter. Representing the cause the clients cause rules. It's okay to lie or stay silent like Jill Biden. You call her doctor Jill. It's okay to lie or stay silent like Joe Biden, if you see yourself as representing the cause, your client, your fiduciary. Roy says, Pete, I think you mispronounced that last name. I don't think so. No, definitely not. I nailed it, Rob, Rob says, mud huts burning our Pooh classic. Pete Bebop in rock Thrill says, Unfortunately, Pete, they have sold the lie, so good Okay, hang on, I'd like to buy a comma right there. Okay, Unfortunately, Pete, they have sold the lie, so good luck trying to reprogram the low IQ voters. And Jeff says, uh, so, I guess the science wasn't so settled. The science is settled. Val Gore. Noah Rothman, writing at National Review, he says what killed the climate alarmism that was once common currency on the democratic left, instrumental political utility and the diminishing returns that democratic politicians were generating by preaching apocalypticism to the converted. At least, that's the lament of Syracuse University professor Matthew Huber. In his widely read New York Times op ed from earlier this month, Huber wrote, for the past several months, Democratic elites have been debating how much to talk about climate change, if at all, in part because these new candidates have narrowed their focus to energy affordability to win back the working class. Funny, huh. I'm old enough to remember when we were promised that green energy was going to reduce the energy costs, that this would create a brand new energy system. We have to be the leaders here. We have to do this stuff. We have to spend trillions of dollars to save Gaya Earth and it's all renewable and so that means the energy would be cheaper. Now, some people like me were saying, that's crazy, that's insane. There's no way this more expensive energy production that's intermittent at best. There's no way that this is going to be able to replace consistent energy production that has been refined over the course of like, oh, I don't know, one hundred and fifty years or so, and so those costs have like dramatically dropped over the course of the lifetime of the industry, right, because that's what happens in free market economies. Not to say that all energy production is a free market by any stretch. However, I was never sold on this idea that renewables, the green energy and all of this would be some would somehow redown to the benefit of the energy consumers. Right. But now that the Democrats are trying to make affordability the horse that they ride into the midterms on because they saw how mom Donnie in New York City made affordability the cornerstone of his campaign, promising all sorts of free stuff because you know, affordability and it's free. So who could argue against free affordability? Right? Obviously, of course, now he's going to start taking people's properties, as commis tend to do, right, you set up? Have you heard this that they've rolled out their their plan for. Going after you know, slum lords in New York City, and they're going to seize the property and they're going to turn them over to either nonprofits or to tenants to run. Oh and by the way, they're going to they're freezing all of the rents, so so they freeze. First step is you freeze all the rents. So this way, the landlord cannot afford to do any improvements because they're not making enough money, maybe even losing money between the costs of upkeep and all of that and taxes to the city and everything else, so they can't afford to do any of the repairs or renovations on the buildings. The buildings fall into disrepair, the tenants trash the rooms and such, they can't fix them. So now you are a Now you're in violation because now the tenants have been empowered with a snitch line to start reporting violations. The city comes and inspects and they say, oh, you are running a slum and so now we're going to nail you with a bunch of violations fines. Landlord can't pay those either, can't afford to repair, and so now they're going to take your property. And then they're going to have a nonprofit run it, and I'm sure the nonprofit will have a bunch of administrators, who are you making four hundred thousand a year? Or they're going to turn it over to the tenants and let them manage the thing. I'm not sure if the property owner would be prohibited from selling at that point, but they should because if like I don't control the property, then I'm not going to just sit here and lose money all the time. Right, Because if you've ever been a part of an HOA, you know that they're not going to increase the dues because they're paying them, right, They're not going to increase the rents, and they were rent they got rent freezes. How did I get on this topic? I don't even know. Oh affordability, right, so free stuff for everybody by taxing you know, the uber wealthy, taking all their money until of course they leave the City of New York. So how do you run an affordability campaign and a climate justice one? Because the climate stuff costs a lot of money, And when people are complaining about affordability or the lack thereof, they make this connection like, well, wait a minute, we're paying more, We're paying all this money for these green energy things, and things are getting more and more unaffordable. Maybe at some point the voters of New York will connect those dots most other Americans have already. Noah Rothman at National Review headline climate change apocalypticism was a fashion, not a cause, which is a great line. It's a fashion not a cause, much like the the Cathia right, the little fashion accessory that the Tentafada folks have been wearing for the Palestinians. Right, these are fashion accessories. Okay, he goes want to say the tacit admission in this New York Times op ed by Matthew Huber from Syracuse University, where he admits that like, look, you know, we're we're ditching like how to talk about climate change if at all, in part because these new candidates have narrowed their focus to energy affordability in order to win back the working class. And so Noah Rothman's pointing out that this is an acknowledgment that the activists go to. Remedies for all of the ills of climate change are policies that limit the public's access to goods and services by making them costlier at a time when affordability is the problem. Climate alarmism is just one of many expendable luxuries. Correct. I have been warning people on the left, you think you are in some sort of oppressed class that intersects with all these other oppressed classes, and that unites you against the orange Hitler or against you know, the equally hitler esque Mitt Romney or the equally hitler esque John McCain, or the equally hit loresque George W. Bush, right, all Republicans. Basically your intersectionality, and you think that that has made you a tribe. And here's the dirty secret. You will go right under the bus as soon as another coalition group is perceived to generate more electoral power than you. And if you don't believe me, look at women's sports, the Democrat Party, my entire adult life. We're all about, you know, defending women, being the voice for women women's health. Which is just abortions. Right. And what happened as soon as the trans coalition group rose to prominence after Obergefeld, after gay marriage right, because and I said this at the time, after that ruling, I was like, there's an entire industry built up around getting gay marriage legalized and they're going to have to shift now that that Supreme Court ruling came down, because again, you got people's jobs. There are people that are in that industry that are making a lot of money fighting for gay marriage, and now they won. So you would think that now all of those nonprofits, all of those activist groups, like they all go away. No, no, no, you find another letter of the alphabet. Right, you find another coalition group to now elevate. And when they elevated, the t's in the LGBT acronym. Well, sorry, ladies, you're gonna have to have dudes naked in the locker room with you. Now you are right under that bus. That's how it goes. So that's what's happening now to the climatists, right, they're going under the bus because the Democrats need to win back the quote working class who are very interested in the economy affordability, and a lot of that unaffordability is driven by energy costs and spending. Climate focused activist networks such as the Sunrise Movement have abandoned the cause. He goes on to say, it now caters to the progressive fringes who have replaced anxiety over climate with anxiety over Israel and the pernicious influence of Americans who support the Jewish state and its defensive military priorities. Right, this is why Sunrise Movement has now all of a sudden shifted to being this like pro Palestinian movement, Like how did that happen? Why did that happen? Because the issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution. They're just Marxists at the cour or. That's it. It's all about power dynamics. They want the power. They will use whatever issue they need in order to get it. And that's why they throw different coalition groups under the bus as needed, because it's a pursuit of power. Right. Even though the Green New Deal's loudest champions have quietly shelved their impossible dreams, it's worth reminding them that they once insisted that their agenda was of such importance that our very lives depended on advancing it. That legislative package's chief proponent, Alexandria A Cajuqutez, deserves the most credit for fleshing out what her chief of staff, named psychot Chakarabardi, admitted was about far more than just climate change. This is what Chakar Robardi said, quote, it wasn't originally a climate thing at all. We really think of it as a how do you change the entire economy thing? That's what it was always about. How do you change the entire economy? Well, why would you want to do that? Well, that's how you implement Marxism, right like, that's how you implement a Marxist economic system. That's what they are interested in, and the Green New Deal was one way to do that. The millions of Americans displaced by this effort to re engineer the American economy would need job placement programs, job training, a universal basic income to support them in their fallow years. That was in the legislation too. So were free college programs designed to make earning a degree a debt free proposition. So was the nationalizations of the American health insurance industry, which would take the form of forcing every American onto medicares, already unsustainable roles. Independent analyses of the Green New Deal pegged its ten year cost at somewhere between thirty two and ninety three trillion dollars. This is what I said earlier, is the juice worth the squeeze? Thirty two to ninety three. So a little bit of a spread there, like that's just a ballpark, right, So it could be thirty two trillion, or it could be ninety three trillion, and this would be funded by wildly confiscatory marginal tax rates, except that actually would not because the math doesn't math on that. If you were to have implemented the marginal taxes that that AOC was promoting, you would generate about seven hundred and twenty billion dollars over a decade, So just a little shy seven hundred twenty billion versus the cost of thirty two trillion dollars. Rothman goes on to say the speed with which the democratic activist class has discarded what they themselves once regarded as nigh religious truth is enough to make you wonder did they ever really mean it? Now? I'm sure to answer Noah's question here. I'm sure there were a lot of useful idiots that do that did still do probably right, There are a lot of people that probably still believe this. But the ones who were promoting it the most were they merely misguided but sincere advocates for revolutionary reforms that they believed were equal to the scale of the problem or was it always just a cynical voter mobilization strategy that has lost its utility now and has since been supplanted by another, more fashionable paranoia, And he says, I think we have our answer. It's the latter, all right. That'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do this without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast, so if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to thepetecalnarshow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.