Massive Curriculum Changes Required for UK School Geography After Met Office Climate Projections Ruled "Implausible"

But don't expect the revisions any time soon

The world of geography teaching in the UK is in crisis following guidance from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that a collection of assumptions used in climate computer modelling known as RCP8.5 is “implausible”. The ruling has effectively trashed the Met Office’s 2018 climate projections report (UKCP18) which only used this scenario to produce a variety of always ridiculous forecasts. To widespread mainstream media acclaim at the time, it was said that summer temperatures could rise by over 5°C in 50 years. Since 2018, UKCP18 has been embedded in UK school geography teaching as a core forecasting source. Its predictions are assessed, used for impact studies and underpin public examinations. The “implausible” ruling means that geography teaching materials particularly at A-level now require a major rewrite of core textbooks involving the removal of all the junk predictions.

Preferably by the start of the Autumn term in September.

It’s not as if teachers can argue that only the ‘high emissions’ pathway of RCP8.5 can be ignored. At the time, the Met Office only ran RCP8.5 assumptions through its super-computer, the results of which it then described as “plausible” as it promoted them in bold type. Using only RCP8.5 was justified on cost grounds since it enabled the available computer time to produce results – guesses might be a more accurate description – down to 2 kms. School resources do note that lower emissions results are available, but these were statistically derived by the Met Office from the RCP8.5 results. This means that all the Met Office projections are compromised and a thorough cleansing needs to be undertaken of all the flawed information wherever it occurs in the teaching environment.

Of course, as the Daily Sceptic has previously reported, the cleansing of UKCP18 is a major job since it has become a foundational source for much UK government and private company climate change regulation and spending. Similar cleansing also needs to take place in mainstream media, but this is a relatively easy job. Since almost every reported scare story over the last 15 years is based on RCP8.5, the climate catastrophising codswallop just needs to be taken down en masse. This will leave chastened, if wiser, journalists free to start again with a clean sheet.