The Death of Climate Alarmism Has Been Greatly Exaggerated

The doomsters have found a new way to keep their religion alive

In late June, the prestigious Foreign Policy journal published an article by Jason Bordoff and Noah Kaufman of Columbia University’s Centre on Global Energy Policy under the arresting headline: ‘Doomsday Climate Scenarios Were Wrong. That Doesn’t Help Europe.’ The timing is significant. The piece appears after the IPCC’s own modelling community had formally declared RCP8.5 — the most extreme emissions pathway that has underpinned virtually every headline climate projection, every Net Zero urgency claim, and every green policy justification for the past two decades — to be “implausible”.

Bordoff and Kaufman, to their credit, acknowledge that critics of climate alarmism have a point. Too many advocates treated worst-case scenarios as likely outcomes. Too much apocalyptic language outran the evidence. President Biden’s 2022 declaration that “climate change is literally an existential threat to our nation and to the world”, they concede, overstated the case. You might think this admission would occasion some reflection on the institutions, models and political programmes built on that discredited foundation. You would be wrong.

Having issued these concessions, Bordoff and Kaufman spend the remainder of their article arguing, with remarkable facility, that nothing has really changed. The doomsday scenario is gone, but alarm must be maintained to avoid complacency. The logic is worth examining carefully, since it represents the most sophisticated version of a move now being executed across the climate establishment as the ground shifts beneath its feet: the pivot from overt apocalypticism to what might be called ‘non-alarmist alarmism’ — a posture that formally disowns the discredited scenario while preserving every policy conclusion that scenario was used to support.

The implausible scenario that built a trillion-dollar edifice

To understand what has been conceded, it is worth recalling what RCP8.5 actually assumed. This was a pathway that projected global coal consumption to quintuple by the end of the century — a trajectory so divorced from physical reality, from known reserves and from observed energy trends that Roger Pielke Jr. of the University of Colorado, a longtime critic of the misuse of extreme climate scenarios, rightly wrote in the Washington Post that “the climate apocalypse isn’t around the corner after all”. Despite being designed as a high-end boundary case for stress-testing models — never as a ‘business as usual’ trajectory — RCP8.5 was cited more than 45,000 times in academic literature, deployed routinely by the World Economic Forum, the European Commission, the ECB climate stress tests and every European climate minister from Stockholm to Madrid. It was the backbone of the EU Green Deal, the UK Climate Change Act, the Fit for 55 package, the nitrogen rules that drove European farmers to the barricades and two decades of energy policy that produced the continent’s deindustrialisation and unaffordable electricity bills. This was not a minor modelling detail. It was the central pillar of the entire Net Zero project. Now it has been declared implausible by the very institution that propagated it.