RCP 8.5 is “WRONG!” in the same sense that Y2K was “A HOAX!!”

Y’ever found a post you wrote and meant to put up a while ago and thought you actually did but you’re doing some performance tuning on your blog, find it, and go oh no it’s still a draft? Well, guess what just happened to me. it’s still kind of relevant, so I’ll hit post, even if it’s no longer quite so current.

Very very slightly different variations on this disinformation have been going around from the far-right for the last week or so, including from Shitstain:

“After 15 years promising that ‘Climate Change’ is going to destroy the Planet, the United Nations TOP Climate Committee just admitted that its own projections were WRONG!”

(Forgive the strikeout, I have no way of drawing down left arrows over text to show that it is disinformation.)

Sadly, this includes on the Microsoft Alumni group on Facebook, in response to recent discussions about climate goals being trainwrecked by AI, and even specifically includes to me. I was tagged directly and invoked by name with the requisite sneering.

Which is how we get here.

Of course, I responded:

This is delightful! If you search using the exact words of your post here, you find the exact same phrases repeated across far-right media. Very well parroted! And just as well misrepresented.

The TL;DR here is that 8.5 is “wrong” in the same sense that Y2K issues were “a hoax.”

People, globally, have been adapting solar, winds, and other zero-emissions technologies at scale. Economic value of renewables is also reinforcing this trend. This combination makes the RCP 8.5 scenario – based on continued unrestrained growth in fossil fuel use with little to no adaptation of zero-emission technologies and reversion away from adoption to date – implausible.

So yes; RCP 8.5 is largely off the table, because people have been doing things which prevent it from happening. Just like widespread Y2K failures became implausible because many people – including many people here – did things to prevent that from happening.

(Similar nonsense has gone around in far-right circles about the ozone layer damage being “a hoax” since it stopped getting worse when governments across the world took action to ban the chemicals causing it.)

You sound very much like grampa complaining that his house was fine all along and the leaks weren’t ever going to get worse after the grandkids brought someone in to patch the roof and repair the plumbing.

This is actually good climate news, by the way. Not great, but good. “Business as Usual” isn’t happening.

The bad news that goes with it is that the low-end, least-impact scenarios have pretty much slipped out of reach. They’re not yet quite “implausible,” but they’re – as they put it – “inconsistent with observed trends during the 2020–2030 period.”

But far-right fossil-fuel-boosting media will not be reporting that.

Here’s the actual paper if you want to read any of it. I haven’t made my way through all of it yet myself, the details are both thick and furry. I haven’t got into the carbon-capture technologies sections at all, for example. But I will.

If you’re wondering how he reacted, he called me a simp parroting Soros propaganda. This response was, obviously, the weakest of sauce. No attempt to engage, no attempt to deal with the facts on the ground, wrong because it’s not what he wanted to hear so definitionally wrong, not actually wrong.

I didn’t expect better out of a cult member. I replied for the benefit of other readers, not for him. I’m not pretending that I was patient or polite – just that unlike him I brought actual facts that I could parallel directly to history he personally knows and understands, making it a situation absolutely, individually relevant to his specific experience. It helped not at all for him, but hopefully did for the people watching around him.

For me, it served as a good reminder that even amongst highly technical people, once they’re in the cult, there’s no actual discussion available. The Fuhrerprinzip is all, they do not want to hear anything else, and so, absolutely will not.

How this ties into “you can’t have a democracy when only one ‘side’ believes in democracy” I leave as an exercise to the reader.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.