Breaking News: The extreme climate scenario, used by the expert United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to forecast catastrophic climate change has been withdrawn.
The international body responsible for IPCC modelling has now officially declared the extreme RCP8.5 scenario is implausible.
This is the doomsday scenario of a world almost totally dependent on coal, with catastrophic warming of 4 to 6 degrees Celsius by 2100, and sea-levels rising well over one metre, that was adopted by our Ministry for the Environment as “business-as-usual” and applied by government agencies and local councils across the country.
The significance of this IPCC decision cannot be over-stated.
Leaving aside the hysterical student marches and climate activism over the years, New Zealanders have been burdened by irrational restrictions and penalties based on this totally unrealistic scenario. Some scientists have been sounding the alarm about this modelling for decades, but their voices have been muzzled and their credibility destroyed by a media blinded by irrational bias.
Back in November 2018, an editorial in Stuff, one of the country’s most influential news sites, screamed “Quick! Save the Planet: We must confront climate change.” They claimed the world’s best climate brains – the IPCC – “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.”
They explained: “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.”
And with that, Stuff shut the door on any debate over the legitimacy of the UN’s new climate measures.
Unfortunately, since most other legacy media followed suit, for the last eight years, instead of informing the public, news outlets have reinforced a catastrophist storyline of unabated climate alarmism not only creating anxiety across society especially in children, but in facilitating the introduction – without any scrutiny – of a raft of apocalyptic-style policy changes that have had a devastating impact on New Zealand.
Before we look into this in more detail, we need to understand what the UN’s scenarios were, and why they are now being withdrawn.
Four Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) were developed more than a decade ago after the IPCC recognised the need for standardised scenarios to serve as consistent inputs for global climate modelling. Rather than creating the scenarios itself, the IPCC invited the broader scientific community to produce some that could be used in its Fifth Assessment Report, AR5.
Four independent modelling teams created pathways that projected future atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and the resulting “radiative forcing” – a measure of the change in the Earth’s energy balance caused by greenhouse gases – expressed in watts per square metre by the year 2100, relative to pre-industrial times.
The IMAGE group in the Netherlands developed RCP2.6, a low-emissions “best-case” scenario with a radiative forcing of 2.6 watts per square metre by 2100.
The GCAM team in the United States produced RCP4.5 and Japan’s NIES created RCP6.0, which were moderate, middle-of-the-road scenarios.
Austria’s IIASA produced the notorious RCP8.5 scenario — an extreme and deliberately alarming vision of the future dominated by coal. In this pathway, coal remains the primary energy source for electricity and, converted into liquid, for transportation. The scenario assumes explosive global population growth, surging economic expansion, and virtually no climate policies whatsoever. It was designed purely to test the outer limits of climate sensitivity — not as a plausible or likely future.
Yet for more than a decade, this highly unrealistic worst-case scenario – RCP8.5 and its later iteration Shared Socioeconomic Pathway SSP5-8.5 – was treated by officials, politicians, and activists as the default “business as usual” pathway, since, when they fed it into climate models, the catastrophic outcomes demanded urgent action: “cut emissions or the planet is doomed”.
For these reasons it has underpinned media commentary generating sensational headlines that created terrifying “news” that boosted ratings. It was eagerly adopted by climate researchers, since its dramatic results led to more publications, contracts and funding. And it was embraced by politicians looking for relevance from a crisis that only they could solve.
Government agencies followed suit. NIWA and the Ministry for the Environment incorporated RCP8.5 into their sea-level rise guidance, treating its extreme predictions of melting ice sheets producing alarming sea-level rise as core central planning assumptions.
Local Government, encouraged to treat these dramatic projections as the baseline for decision-making, introduced strict new building restrictions. Instead of focusing on strengthening sea walls, improving drainage, and investing in practical resilience measures, councils are now considering “managed retreat” to relocate entire communities.
Families who have lived on the coast for generations are being told their homes are effectively “stranded assets” – not because of observed sea-level trends, but because of the predictions of a scenario that was never intended to guide real-world policy.
Insurance companies embraced these developments by increasing premiums in areas deemed “high risk” under RCP8.5 projections that will never eventuate.
And when the UN convened the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, armed with RCP8.5 modelling, major New Zealand banks joined in, committing to decarbonising their books by tightening lending to “high-emission” sectors such as dairy, sheep and beef, and oil and gas, while also restricting finance to coastal and flood-prone properties.
RCP8.5 was central – of course – to the justification for New Zealand’s Net Zero 2050 policy. By using this extreme scenario to depict catastrophic warming and disaster if nothing changed, the Climate Change Commission created the political and emotional urgency needed to push through aggressive Net Zero targets and ever-higher carbon charges.
This seriously distorted New Zealand’s electricity market, as the rising cost of carbon on the gas and coal used as backup thermal generation to maintain security of supply when the lakes are low, the wind doesn’t blow, and the sun doesn’t shine, significantly inflated the price of power.
The Emissions Trading Scheme alone now adds over $200 a year onto the average power bill though carbon levies that are expected to increase further as the Net Zero agenda unfolds.
It’s a similar story with fuel: with a policy framework based on these now-discredited extreme scenarios, the ETS carbon levy at the pump has been over 20 cents a litre – but now sits around 10 cents per litre.
New Zealand’s trade position has also been affected. Terrified of being labelled climate laggards and losing market access, successive New Zealand governments have used the urgency created by RCP8.5 to justify aggressive Net Zero policies – turning climate virtue-signalling into a de facto trade compliance issue at significant cost to our economy.
But now, in a development of enormous significance, the international body responsible for developing the scenarios that underpin all IPCC reports has finally admitted what critics have been arguing for years: the extreme RCP8.5 pathway is not credible in climate modelling.
The ScenarioMIP group – which is responsible for the IPCC’s modelling framework – has eliminated RCP8.5, SSP5‑8.5, and SSP3‑7.0 from the next generation of scenarios. In a just-published paper introducing the new scenario framework that will be used by the IPCC in their Seventh Assessment Report – they determined that the high-end emissions levels previously used by the IPCC “have become implausible”.
This is no minor adjustment – it is an historic shift. The very body tasked with developing the official scenarios for the IPCC has now admitted that the extreme RCP8.5 and SSP5-8.5 pathways – which have underpinned climate alarmism, media headlines, and government policy for over a decade – are no longer plausible.
This week’s NZCPR Guest Commentator Professor Roger Pielke of Colorado University, a leading critic of RCP 8.5 extremism, outlines this historic change:
“The international committee responsible for the official scenarios that feed into climate modelling that are the basis for most projective climate research and the assessments of the IPCC has just published the next generation of climate scenarios.
“Big news: The new framework has eliminated the most extreme scenarios that have dominated climate research over much of the past several decades — specifically, RCP8.5. This is an absolutely huge development in climate science which will have lasting impacts across research and policy.
“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 are implausible: They describe impossible futures.
“This means that users of climate models based on legacy scenarios will now face decisions about if and how they’d like to realign with the latest scientific understandings versus continuing to rely on outdated research.”
What is most disturbing is the refusal of New Zealand’s mainstream media to report on this groundbreaking development.
In comparison, it made front page news in the Netherlands, with the headline “UN Climate Panel Drops Doomsday Scenario” and was covered in both Germany and Switzerland.
But as Professor Pielke explains, it is what happens next that is of major concern.
With New Zealand institutions including State sector agencies, local government, NIWA, the Ministry for the Environment, the banking, insurance, and electricity sectors, along with much of the media, having embedded RCP8.5 in their policy framework, unwinding all of this will not be easy
That means the Government will need to take a lead by issuing a directive halting all decision‑making that relies on RCP8.5 or any of its derivatives. No council should restrict land use, no agency should issue guidance, no insurer should classify risk, and no bank should adjust lending criteria based on a scenario that the international scientific community has now rejected.
Furthermore, the Government must establish an urgent, comprehensive, and fully independent review to ascertain just how far the influence of RCP8.5 has spread.
These actions are essential, but they are only the beginning.
NIWA and the Ministry for the Environment should be instructed to withdraw all guidance that embeds extreme scenarios as central assumptions, with a view to replacing them with realistic scenarios, once they have been developed.
Perhaps it is also time to consider a statutory mechanism to assess any advice from international agencies that’s to be used to guide domestic policy with the mandatory disclosure of the assumptions that underpin it, so it’s available for public scrutiny beforeit can create damage.
What is very clear is that New Zealand can no longer justify basing major national policies on a scenario that has now been formally rejected by the very international body whose advice underpinned our entire climate agenda. A full and immediate political reset is essential – one that removes these flawed “implausible” assumptions RCP 8.5 and SSP5-8.5 before they inflict even more damage on New Zealand households and businesses.
Continuing to base New Zealand law, council rules, insurance requirements, and taxpayer-funded decisions on projections that assume a coal-powered dystopia that could never materialise is not just poor governance, it is reckless and indefensible.
Every day these discredited scenarios remain in use, more unnecessary damage is inflicted: communities are being threatened with relocation based on imagined sea-level rise, families are facing skyrocketing insurance premiums, property rights are being eroded, and households are paying higher prices for power and fuel. The government must urgently replace these extreme assumptions with realistic scenarios so that policy can be recalibrated before even more avoidable harm is caused.
New Zealanders have endured more than a decade of costly, fear-driven policies built on modelling that was never credible. The time for reckoning has arrived. Anything less than a full and uncompromising correction of this house of cards would be a profound betrayal of the New Zealand public.
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1 comment:
Not only have we been brainwash by the corrupt MSM but by the entire political machine that continues to tax the gullible to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. Real leadership was on display when Trump denounced the climate lie as the “greatest con job” to the UN’s general assembly. Hans Christian Andersen’s folk story, The Emperors New Clothes is still appropriate today. To speak the truth, even when others stay silent.
Unfortunately I have very little faith in the political machine that burdens our lives with unnecessary costs, to make any meaningful change.
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