Barry Brill - NZ Climate Policy: A Conspiracy of Silence

"When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?" – J M Keynes

Back in 2022, I wrote about "The overdue retraction of a giant lie" – the UN's quiet admission that its future global temperature forecasts had been wildly exaggerated and needed to be halved.

UNEP had just reported to COP27 that "the world is on track for 2.5°C" by 2100. This followed two decades of alarming forecasts of 4–8°C by 2100, which had "called forth warnings of civilisational collapse and even a sort of human endgame" (as the New York Times put it).

This huge reduction resulted from excluding extreme scenarios, primarily RCP8.5.

The residual forecast 2.5°C over 250 years (1850–2100) is nearly perfect. It is the end of the climate alarm, and well within the zone where temperature increases bring net benefits to humanity, rather than net harm.

More than half of the 2.5°C has already occurred, so the UN is now forecasting a rise of only 1.1°C over the next 75 years – about one-tenth of a degree every six years. This is a lower warming rate than we have experienced over the last 50 years. It is getting better for our grandchildren, not worse.

Let that sink in……

The apocalypse has been averted. The human race has ducked a bullet. But there have been no worldwide celebrations, no fireworks displays, no ticker-tape parades.

The UN did not even issue a press statement. Political leaders from 193 UN member states had nothing to say. The corporate media maintained wall-to-wall silence worldwide. The rigid discipline imposed by editors everywhere has never been matched for any other breaking story – let alone one with global existential ramifications.

The RCP8.5 Fiction – And the Nine-Year Cover-Up

The details of RCP8.5 have always been an insult to the intelligence of those who took the trouble to read them. The scenario required a five-fold increase in global coal use by 2100, a tripling of total emissions, and the complete abandonment of all energy-efficiency gains made since 1990. It was, in short, a fiction – and a transparent one.

Yet, with the connivance of two US billionaires, it was adopted as the most widely used emissions scenario in approximately 90% of the tens of thousands of peer-reviewed research papers published over the past decade.

Nearly ten years ago, Ritchie and Dowlatabadi (2017), in a paper subtitled "Are cases of vastly expanded future coal combustion still plausible?" thoroughly refuted the scenario. Their paper was widely discussed but never successfully challenged.

Then, in 2022, Roger Pielke Jr. and colleagues made it unambiguous: the extreme scenario was not merely unlikely but impossible. It could never actually happen.

The dam had burst within climate science – yet nothing changed in the flow of research grant funding, nor in the editorial policies of Nature, Science, and other prestigious learned journals. The shadowy influence-drivers of global climate alarmism collectively decreed that the pretence must go on.

Finally, in May 2026, Van Vuuren et al. (VVetal26) – the ScenarioMIP committee responsible for official IPCC modelling scenarios – published its next-generation framework for AR7, formally retiring RCP8.5 and its equivalents, as well as RCP6.0, as "implausible." Somewhat ironically, Van Vuuren himself had led the original 2011 RCP project that had produced the now-discredited scenarios.

Roger Pielke Jr. called this publication "the most significant development in climate science in decades."

The timeline of the conspiracy of silence is thus: a definitive refutation in 2017, a conclusive demolition in 2022, the UN's own halving of temperature projections the same year – and formal retirement only in 2026. Nine years of silence from those best placed to speak.

The IPCC: No Audit, No Apology, No Accountability

The IPCC's handling of this correction has been, to put it charitably, less than distinguished. There was no press conference. There was no apology to the governments, businesses, and households whose decisions were distorted by projections now acknowledged as implausible. There was no external audit – nor will there ever be one. The van Vuuren review was conducted by insiders assessing their own previous work. Notably, the lead author was reviewing scenarios he had himself created.

Nor will accountability be easy to establish going forward. For AR7, the IPCC intends to shift its baseline from 2010 to 2020. This manoeuvre insulates the institution from valid comparisons with its own prior projections. The hundreds of thousands of climate model runs conducted between 1990 and 2026 – largely premised on RCP8.5 and its predecessors – will become methodologically awkward to compare against future outputs. The failures will be quietly absorbed into a new baseline, as a company might restate its accounts to eliminate prior years' losses.

The new CMIP7 high scenario is 0.9°C cooler than SSP5-8.5 on a like-for-like basis – and 1.4°C cooler than the AR6 projection. That is not a minor technical revision. That is a fundamental change in the organisation's view of the future. That it has passed without institutional comment speaks volumes about the IPCC's commitment to transparency.

One is entitled to ask: if the IPCC cannot be relied upon to be fully transparent about a systemic error of this magnitude, how can its future outputs continue to serve as the unquestioned basis for national policy?

Political Leaders: Where Are the Celebrations?

Across 193 UN member states, political leaders have governed for the past two decades under the shadow of an existential climate threat. Children have been traumatised. Young couples have decided not to have children. Countries have committed trillions to net-zero targets by 2050. Climate change has been described, routinely and in the highest forums, as the greatest ever threat to humanity.

Now the UN's own modelling community tells us that the scenarios underpinning those claims were implausible. They now say the most likely warming over the next 75 years is approximately 1.1°C – a lower rate than we have already comfortably survived over the past half-century.

Where are the statements of relief from prime ministers and presidents? Where are the parliamentary debates examining what policies, built on false premises, should now be reconsidered? The silence is as total as it is revealing.

The only world leader to comment publicly was US President Donald Trump, who declared on Truth Social: "The United Nations TOP Climate Committee just admitted that its own projections were WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!”. His opponents immediately used the intemperate phrasing to dismiss the substance. But the substance remains, regardless of who raises it.

Professor Henry Ergas has put the broader question precisely: "Yet with so many of its dramatic predictions in tatters, the question is no longer whether [the alarmist narrative] was right or wrong. It is how a misleading narrative acquired such power that it helped make economic self-harm the West's supreme moral virtue."

Are political leaders embarrassed to acknowledge that they have been over-egging the emergency for years? Do they regard the halving of the climate threat as a non-event? Or are they simply hoping, as the corporate media appears to hope, that no one will notice?

The Media: Advocacy Mistaken for Journalism

The most consequential silence is that of the mainstream media. Pielke has documented this meticulously: the retirement of RCP8.5 is, by his authoritative assessment, "the most significant development in climate science in decades" – yet not a single major English-language outlet has run a banner headline or front-page story.

The Guardian ran many dozens – perhaps hundreds – of stories premised on RCP8.5 projections over the past 15 years. It has run nothing on the scenario's retirement. Carbon Brief – the specialist outlet that covered RCP8.5 more than perhaps any other English-language publication – has been silent. Neither Science nor Nature – both of which thrived on publishing RCP8.5-based research – has covered the retirement of the extreme scenarios. The BBC ran a More or Lessepisode on the RCP8.5 problem in December 2025 but has published nothing since the formal cancellation.

The contrast with continental Europe is instructive. The Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant ran the story on its front page. The German publication Die Welt observed: "A lobby made RCP8.5 famous: the most sensationalist of all climate scenarios has determined scientific studies, media and politics – yet it is unrealistic. Now it is actually being phased out."The Berliner Zeitung acknowledged that "extreme climate scenarios played too large a role in public debate for too long."

English-language media silence is not explained by the story's technical complexity. Dutch and German reporters managed perfectly well. It is explained, rather, by the fact that the outlets most invested in promoting RCP8.5 have the most to lose from a clear-eyed accounting of what its retirement means – for science, for policy, and for their own coverage.

Pielke notes that in 2022-26 alone, more than 2,600 studies have already been published using the now-discredited high-emission scenarios. The research machine has not paused. The alarm industry has not paused. Only the honest reckoning has been deferred.

As Tilak Doshi has noted, climate zealots now acknowledge, with some candour, that the extreme scenario "was always viewed as an unlikely outlier to help galvanise policymakers." That admission – buried in commentary rather than announced in headlines – is more damning than the retirement itself. The scenario was deployed not because scientists believed it, but because it was useful.

A Moratorium Is Essential

New Zealand is not exempt from this reckoning. Our Zero Carbon Act, climate budgets, local government climate action plans, district plan changes, building code amendments, and infrastructure investment decisions all draw their urgency from modelling premised on scenarios now officially acknowledged as implausible.

These policies were not framed as contingent responses to one possible future among many. They were presented as necessary responses to an existential emergency. That emergency has now been substantially revised downward by the UN's own modelling community. But our Climate Change Minister has not reacted or commented.

There must now be an immediate moratorium on all new national and local government policies, guidelines, codes of practice, by-laws, and regulatory instruments that rely on RCP8.5 or its equivalents (SSP5-8.5, SSP3-7.0) as their evidential foundation. Existing policies premised on those scenarios need to be reviewed.

If a policy can be justified under moderate scenarios – the 2.4–2.7°C range now considered most plausible – retain it. If its rationale evaporates without the extreme scenario's assumed impacts, it should be abandoned.

This is not a call to abandon climate policy. It is a call for evidence-based climate policy. When foundational assumptions prove false, there is little confidence in any superstructure built on them. A pharmaceutical approved on the basis of flawed trial data is withdrawn. A building standard, premised on revised seismic assumptions, is updated. Climate policy should be no different.

Honourable Exceptions

I must acknowledge that a few –very few– brave and lonely voices have been raised in New Zealand over recent years.

Our most highly qualified climate scientist, Professor David Frame, who is a lead author for the IPCC, has repeatedly warned that using RCP8.5 as a real forecast is “a crazy unscientific approach” which exposes Councils to legal challenge. He called it “the scenario nobody believes”.

Back in 2022, Stuart Smith MP, now the Chief Government Whip, the ‘great news’ that COP27 expected 21st-century warming to be limited to 2.5°C. He credited this advance to the abandonment of the “implausible” RCP8.5.

More recently, Simon Court, MP, Undersecretary for RMA Reform, has warned Councils against “skewing the viability of projects” by using NIWA forecasts based on RCP8.5.

Sadly, the Minister (and his entire Ministry) has ignored them all.

Conclusion

The conspiracy of silence surrounding the death of RCP8.5 is, at its core, a crisis of institutional integrity. Scientists knew. Climate journalists knew. The UN's own agencies knew – and said so, quietly, in a COP27 report that barely registered.

For nine years after Ritchie and Dowlatabadi's definitive refutation, the pretence continued, sustained by funding structures, editorial incentives, and political convenience.

The question that New Zealanders are entitled to put to their government is a simple one: if the extreme scenarios that justified our climate emergency declarations, our billions in net-zero commitments, and our cascade of regulatory impositions were implausible all along – what are you going to do about it?

The silence, so far, has been deafening.

Key References

1. Brill, "The Overdue Retraction of a Giant Lie", Breaking Views, November 2022

2. Ritchie & Dowlatabadi, "Is USD 1.1 trillion our anthropogenic straw that broke the carbon budget's back?", Energy, 2017

3. Pielke Jr., "RCP8.5 is Officially Dead", AEI/The Hockey Stick Blog, May 2026

4. Van Vuuren et al. (VVetal26), ScenarioMIP framework for IPCC AR7, 2026

5. Pielke Jr., "Media Coverage (or Not) of RCP8.5 RIP", AEI, May 2026

6. Daily Sceptic, "Shocked Silence Greets RCP8.5 Demise", May 2026

7. NZCPR Newsletter / Pielke, "The End of Climate Extremism", May 2026

Barry Brill OBE JP LL.M(Hons) M.ComLaw is a former MP and Minister of Energy, Petrocorp director, and chair of the Gas Council, Power NZ, ESANZ, and EMCO. He is presently the Chairman of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition.