Rage, Rage Against the Dying of the Net Zero Dream

Green elites double down as they refuse to go gentle into that good night

The Net Zero nightmare is collapsing. On Monday, Belgian author and commentator Drieu Godefridi posted the news that should have sent shockwaves through Brussels: the IPCC had formally admitted that its most extreme climate scenario, RCP8.5, is “implausible”. The very pathway that underpinned the entire European Green Deal, trillions in spending, farmer-crushing regulations and two decades of energy-suicide policies across the EU, UK, Canada and Australia has been exposed as fantasy. “The house of cards is falling,” Godefridi writes. “Von der Leyen and the entire EU Deep State are cornered.” Science, he says, demands the explicit repudiation of all EU documents, legislation and communications built on this doomsday scenario – and therefore the repeal of the Green Deal in its entirety.

Roger Pielke Jr., the American political scientist who has tracked this issue for years, put it even more starkly in late April: “RCP8.5 is officially dead.” The international committee responsible for the scenarios feeding into the IPCC’s Seventh Assessment Report has eliminated the high-end pathways – RCP8.5, SSP5-8.5 and SSP3-7.0 – that have dominated climate research, headlines and policy for the better part of two decades. As the new van Vuuren et al. framework for CMIP7 makes clear, these extreme scenarios are no longer credible.

Notes: The radiosonde trend bar in the above plot (green) is the average of three datasets; the reanalysis trend (black) is fromtwo2 datasets, and the satellite trend (blue) is the average of three datasets. Out of all types of observational data, only the satellites provide complete coverage of the tropics. All 39 climate models exhibit significantly higher warming trends than all three classes of observational data.

One might have expected a moment of reflection in the corridors of power in Brussels, Berlin, Paris and London – and for that matter, in fellow globalist-green counterparts in Ottawa and Canberra. After all, the EU Green Deal’s binding targets, the Fit for 55 package, the carbon border adjustment mechanism, the nitrogen rules that have driven European farmers to the barricades, the heat-pump mandates and, in the UK, the UK Climate Change Act and the deliberate suppression of domestic fossil resources were all sold to the public on the back of RCP8.5’s apocalyptic projections of 4-5°C warming, mass extinctions and civilisational collapse.