The New Deniers

It was about time the climate cabal was forced to wear their own pejorative.

“Everything was perfectly healthy and normal here in Denial Land.” - Jim Butcher, Cold Days

“The Church of Carbon” is a term Doomberg coined several years ago to describe the cabal of scientists, legacy media, environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs, aka non-profits), activists, celebrities and others who denominate every issue through the lens of CO2 emissions and “climate change.” Members have a variety of terms to describe anyone who challenges the prevailing view that “climate change” is a catastrophic problem for earth and humanity, and “flat earther” is not even close to the most derogatory.

More than twenty years ago, the Church’s most ardent and vocal priests and apostles began to paint heretics with the term global warming “denier.” The not-so-subtle term is an effort to shut down those who would dare question their religion.

The choice of term is not accidental. It attempts to liken climate religion heretics and apostates to those who deny that the Holocaust – the WWII stain on the history of humanity that killed six million Jews in the 1940s - ever occurred.

The deranged “logic” goes something like this: paint those who question what “the science” says with a term so ugly that they are simply beneath inclusion in any rational, civil debate over matters of such importance. “The opinions of people who deny things like “climate change” or the Holocaust are not worthy of consideration in the public discourse over policy,” or so it goes.

The now two-decade pattern of using the term “denier” in this matter is worse than ugly. It shamefully denigrates the death and suffering of millions, and with the subtle wink of an eye attempts to conflate the act of asking legitimate scientific questions with human atrocities.

Educated scientists, politicians and legacy media who should have known better than to believe using the term “denier” would allow them to avoid directly answering hard questions. The strategy was never going to succeed in the long run, and the history of science is replete with examples of its laughable failure. See the Catholic Church, Copernicus and Galileo and the earth-centric view of the universe, for starters.

Our March 2024 post Cook-Ing Up Censorship highlighted a report by a UK-based think tank on a mission to define and suppress ideas with which it disagrees as “hate speech” run by a character with connections that raise no shortage of questions. Included in what Imran Ahmed and the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) define as “misinformation, disinformation and malinformation” is just about anything related to “climate change” that counters the mainstream narrative. The New Climate Denial was the 2024 CCDH report that outlined the media platforms and content creators who profit by spreading what it defines as “new forms” of climate “denial.”

Whereas the “old denial” focused on arguing that anthropogenic “global warming” was not occurring or that human emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) are not causing it, the report suggests the “new denial” spreads “hate speech” by suggesting that the impacts of warming are more beneficial than harmful, climate policies and green energy “solutions” won’t fix it, and that climate science and the climate movement are uncertain and “unreliable.”

“Denial” is hate speech!

The New Climate Denial authors include John Cook, creator of the website, SkepticalScience.com (SkS). Cook is not a scientist but an outspoken critic of any human who questions any aspect of the climate apocalypse, and SkS is his weapon of choice.

Cook and the research team used an artificial intelligence large language model they trained and named CARDS (“Computer-Assisted Recognition of climate change Denial and Skepticism”) to ferret out “the taxonomy of five climate denialist super-claims and 17 related sub-claims.” They used CARDS to identify “the changing tactics of climate deniers on YouTube by analyzing thousands of hours of transcripts of videos on the platform from 96 channels dating back to 2018.”

The New Climate Denial uses some form of the term denier over 275 times in a report of 34 pages. On average, some form of the pejorative term appears more than seven times per page.

Last month we published the news that the most apocalyptic scenarios of future GHG emissions used by the world’s climate scientists and research organizations have officially been tossed in the trash heap, deemed by the very cabal that created them as “implausible.” Near the close of Implausible Deniability we posed a few questions (emphasis added):

…will the scientific community admit their errors and change course? Tens of thousands of research papers have relied on the now discredited high emissions BAU scenarios, including RCP8.5 and SSP5-8.5, across all six emissions scenario frameworks. Will politically motivated climate scientists continue to push for their relevance as “reference” scenarios?

What about the legacy media? Having published tens of thousands and to possibly over a hundred thousand articles depicting these cremated scenarios as the “business as usual” trajectory the world was on, with every adverse weather event held as evidence of the forthcoming climate Armageddon, and fear their cheapest and easiest sell, will they admit that the truth was not what they chose to present?

It only took a bit more than a month after the new first broke before the answer became clear. What is the Church of Carbon and its priests, apostles and book publishers saying? How are the “implausible” scenarios being portrayed and even defended? Grab your giant soup spoon. It’s time to give some very deserving folks a dose of their own medicine.

Our story begins with a reality that the new deniers just can’t seem to choke down: the high GHG emissions scenarios that scared the world into a panicked spend of ~$5 trillion did not die because we suddenly got serious about spinning green crucifixes (wind turbines), sun catchers (solar arrays), and “green hydrogen” (via electrolysis from either that will never happen in any material quantity). The sky-is-falling scenarios were implausible from their conception because they were grounded in unrealistic assumptions about energy, economics, or demography (population/birth rates). And the people who built them and are now defending them despite these clear errors know it.

But based on the reactions from most of the scientific establishment, explainer media, and climate‑policy world, you’d think the only reason the apocalyptic emissions scenarios known as RCP8.5 and SSP5‑8.5 are now “implausible” is because heroic climate policies and “cheap renewables” saved earth and humanity in the nick of time. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The graph below shows global CO2 emissions intensity from fossil fuels and industry since 1900 measured in kilograms of CO₂ emitted per dollar of GDP, using 2011 international dollars (adjusted for inflation within countries over time, and differences in the cost of living). As you can clearly see, the impact of the Kyoto Protocol (signed 1997, entered force 2005), the Paris Agreement (adopted 2015, entered force 2016), the European Clean Development Mechanism (the EU’s carbon taxation mechanism, part of Kyoto), the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act (2022), and any other United Nations climate agreement or domestic policy of any western nation had absolutely no impact on the slope of the trend shown below.

Global carbon intensity peaked in 1960 and has been steadily falling ever since, with no discernible change in the rate since any of these measures. If “climate policies and cheap renewables” have made a material impact, it cannot be seen in the graph above.

In the nearly 30 years since the world’s first international climate agreement, the Kyoto Protocol, was signed, the portion of world primary energy consumption from oil, coal and natural gas has fallen a whopping five percentage points from 85.7% of total to 80.6%. That is why no changes in the trend of carbon intensity can be seen in the first graph above.

As we noted in Implausible Deniability, the emissions scenario designers for United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UN IPCC) upcoming Seventh Assessment Report (AR7) – the ScenarioMIP group – published the updates scenarios in a paper by van Vuuren et al in early April.

Buried in the paper was a sentence that leveled twenty years of apocalyptic climate narratives, while at the same time misattributing the cause of their demise:

“For the 21st century, this range will be smaller than assessed before: on the high‑end of the range, the CMIP6 high emission levels (quantified by SSP5‑8.5) have become implausible, based on trends in the costs of renewables, the emergence of climate policy and recent emission trends.”

As we documented, the new “high” emissions scenario projects global annual GHG emissions of only ~78 gigatons (Gt) vs. RCP8.5’s >128 Gt by the year 2100. The current trajectory runs in the range of ~43 – 50 Gt annually by 2100. The latter amount is less than half the annual GHG emissions projections from which the forcing potential for nearly 10 degrees warming Fahrenheit by the end of the century was calculated.

That is to say, the high‑end SSP5‑8.5 pathway—RCP8.5’s successor—no longer passes the straight face test. Not by a country mile.

Climate researchers Zeke Hausfather, Glen Peters, and Piers Forster fairly summarized that reality in “On the death of RCP8.5.” The authors concede that the worst‑case family of emissions scenarios “has become implausible,” and that tripling global GHG emissions or multiplying coal consumption fivefold by 2100 were wildly divergent from humanity’s actual track.

But they frame the cause as a good-news story about the rapid decline in the cost of “renewable” energy, the emergence of climate policies, and flattening emissions trends. The first two occurred but had nothing to do with the third, as our graph above shows quite clearly.

The message that “we saved ourselves from the worst case” is politically convenient even as it is scientifically laughable. It’s a two-step dance the very climate research community that portrayed the very same scenarios as “business as usual” might have gotten away with but for the tireless work of researchers like Justin Ritchie, Hadi Dowlatabadi, and Substack publisher Roger Pielke, Jr.

Their detailed takedowns of RCP8.5 and its successor SSP5-8.5 now leave no quarter for those in the scientific, legacy media, and environmental non-government organization (ENGOs like Greenpeace, Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club) communities and the Charlaticians™ who portrayed these scenarios as the world’s “climate” track, with apocalyptic results nearly certain and always imminent. We noted many of the same reasons in Implausible Deniability, emphasizing the wildly erroneous population projections baked into the scenarios.

For some within that scientific community, remaining silent on the misuse of the implausible scenarios was not the worst offense. Those who routinely crossed the line between disinterested scientific analysis and political advocacy have even greater responsibility.

2 minutes for high (hockey) sticking | Michael Mann (Joshua Yospyn/Wikipedia)

These scientists have the most egg on their faces today. Watching some of them justify their actions and even attempt to hold on to emissions scenarios whose “sell by” date expired more than a decade ago is highly informative, and great entertainment value for us.

Put simply: Climate policy and “renewable” energy didn’t retroactively make the high emissions scenarios RCP8.5 and SSP5-8.5 unrealistic. They were never realistic from their conception.

This is the history the new “implausible thanks to renewables and policy” narrative is trying to omit. But it is the storyline put forth in most explainers that were rushed out to cover the high GHG emissions scenarios’ implosion.

One of the Church of Carbon’s high priests, climate scientist Michael Mann, wasted no time trying to sell the narrative. Hour after we posted Implausible Deniability, in his uniquely bombastic manner Trump took a victory lap and, as usual, actually got part of the story right. Naturally, Mann could not help himself from both taking a swing at Orangemanbad and implausibly confusing cause and effect, claiming we’re not tracking below the high emissions scenarios “because of climate policy in spite of Trump.”

If science were baseball, the clip below would be Dr. Mann trying to barrel up the “policy did it!” narrative. (Oooh. That’s gonna leave a mark!)

Other scientists like NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt falsely accused those properly celebrating the demise of the high emissions scenarios in the IPCC’s forthcoming update for exactly the reasons they had been pointing out for years as “bad faith BS.”

Schmidt, likely embarrassed by the highly detailed points made by the likes of Roger Pielke, Jr., Justin Ritchie and Hadi Dowlatabadi, resorted to personal attacks (emphasis ours):

People (hi Roger!) acting as if the publication of new CMIP7 scenarios is some huge policy shift or an admission that previous scenarios are no longer ‘official’ are just bull-shitting. This is something that was planned for and expected for literally years. Previous scenario sets were used in previous rounds, a new set will be used for the new round – that is all there is to it.

Oh, good cut Gavin! Thanks for the cool breeze! 😊

As for legacy media, Forbes’ Marshall Shepherd tried a softer approach, opting to try and “clarify” the torching of the high emissions scenarios. Using an analogy about beers at a bar, he left readers with the impression that we still face major risks from climate change and must redouble policy efforts, despite the “business as usual,” worst case scenarios being off the table now.

The same is true for the New York Times and Washington Post, both of whom framed the story so that scientists responsibly updating their models are merely progress, and wealthy nations’ climate agreements and domestic policies get the credit for bending the emissions curve. RCP8.5 is described as a “dire” or “do nothing” path that is only now off the table thanks to our glorious climate policy and “renewable energy” subsidy slush funds efforts.

The American version of French news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP) tried to cover four bases with its attempt. It pulled the scientific “consensus” card, portrayed dropping the high emissions scenarios as an “adjustment,” claimed their removal was being “misrepresented” across social media, and tried to sell the narrative that the changes resulted from “renewable energy implementation.”

None of the legacy media who stepped into the scientific batter’s box got hit in the face trying to knock the high emissions scenarios back into relevance like Michael Mann. But none of them looked any better in their plate appearances than Michael Mann or Gavin Schmidt.

Absent from all of their pieces was a candid reckoning with the fact that the “business as usual” path required energy, economic and demographic contortions that were never remotely likely, even without climate treaties or “renewable energy” subsidies.

The ENGO’s fared no better. The Center for Progressive Reform - apparently tipped off to the upcoming van Vuuren et al paper announcing the new ScenarioMIP group’s dropping of the high emissions scenarios - said RCP8.5 (and by extension is successor, SSP5-8.5) “remains not only legitimate, but crucial..”

CPR argued that scientists using the high emissions scenarios “are not out to shock or deceive; they are simply following the best science.” Even if the pathway is implausible, the authors insist, using it “is not misleading.”

This is precisely the type of misdirection that enabled an implausible scenario to colonize impact assessments, financial‑risk models, and national climate reports for a decade. It wasn’t just an objective “stress test.” It was the basis for “business as usual” rhetoric that scared the public into believing 4–6 °C of warming by 2100 was what happens if we don’t pass the next climate bill. And the one after that.

CarbonBrief spoke with one of the authors of the van Vuuren et al paper’s authors. The ENGO leaned into old tropes and stayed a country mile away from the core of the controversy – the real reasons why the high emissions scenarios were always implausible:

“...projections suggest that the world is still on course for between 2.5C and 3C of warming, another author says.

...This level of warming was previously described as “catastrophic” by the UN.”

CarbonBrief’s choice to put Orangemanbad’s face bearing a skeptical grimace was a nice touch. But it did not help CarbonBrief or CPR in the batter’s box any more than their cohorts above. Instead, they all made themselves scientific laughing stocks.

And finally, what about our friend John Cook over at Skepticalscience.com, author of the Center for Countering Digital Hate report The New Denial? On May 25, Cook republished RCP8.5 Update, a post from Ken Rice that originally appeared on And Then There’s Physics. Rice repeats climate scientist Gavin Schmidt’s subheading:

“The fantasy version of the normal updating of scenarios for a new round of CMIP simulations doing the rounds is bad faith BS.”

SkS’ entire justification consisted of linking to Schmidt’s article, CPR’s article, and others. Conveniently absent was any admission that the assumptions embedded in RCP8.5 or SSP5-8.5 years earlier about future coal use or population growth were erroneous or acknowledging that the steady decline in carbon intensity per unit of GDP preceded all climate policies and the growth of “renewable” energy.

Speaking of “bad faith,” a scientific culture and community that was capable of self-correction and genuinely committed to the integrity of the scientific method would not behave in such a manner. The same can be said for legacy media and ENGO complexes that were genuinely interested in reducing environmental impacts while advancing human prosperity.

If these actors were actually interested in doing so, one would at least expect that they would explicitly acknowledge that RCP8.5/SSP5‑8.5 were erroneous by specification - not just rendered implausible by virtuous policy. They would stop treating legitimate critics who specified very precise plausibility concerns a decade ago (that turned out to be correct) as bad‑faith actors. And they would revise impact assessments, “Social Cost of Carbon” estimates, and financial sector stress‑test designs that were built on what the scenario designers themselves now call implausible futures.

And if RCP8.5 and its successor SSP5-8.5 were always energy‑economically-demographically incoherent, some uncomfortable questions need to be asked and answered:

• How did these scenarios survive peer review and become defined as “business as usual”?

• Why did so few within the climate‑science establishment amplify critiques like those of Roger Pielke, Jr., Justin Ritchie, and others when they first came out? Was it the source they did not like or the nature of their findings?

• Setting aside the $5 trillion spent, how much of the public’s trust was squandered fearmongering a tail‑risk by presenting it as a central expectation?

It is far cleaner, reputationally, to tell a story in which the models were fine, the scenarios were fine, and they only became “implausible” because we rose to the challenge with climate policy and “renewable energy.” That’s not science, it’s narrative maintenance, religion, or maybe a scientific tooth fairy story.

We close by pointing out the delicious and unavoidable irony. For nearly two decades, all of these scientists, legacy media “journalists” and editors, and ENGOs have been screaming “denier” at anyone who challenges the prevailing narrative. Yet here we stand, with the UN’s own scenario development function deeming “implausible” the exceedingly high GHG emissions scenarios on which these people and institutions based their endless use of the pejorative term denier.

Consider the second and third order consequences of scaring the world with the always- farfetched, high GHG emissions scenario projections: Young people are declining to have children based on misplaced fears their kids will have no future. $5 trillion (and counting) has been spent on “solutions” that could not possibly fix an apocalyptic crisis that does not exist. Soaring electricity costs and two lost decades refusing the one electricity generation technology in the advanced world (nuclear) that is GHG emissions free while subsidizing “renewable energy” technologies instead.

Perhaps the worst consequence of all are policies that have kept the developing world from being able to finance projects capable of delivering dispatchable, reliable, affordable electricity to the world’s poor, where it is desperately needed to raise living standards.

The New Deniers™ are the actors that enabled all of these outcomes, are still pretending that RCP8.5 and SSP5-8.5 are important, valuable, or relevant, and portraying these scenarios as implausible because climate policies worked and the cost of “renewables” dropped dramatically. In actuality, they were never anything more than climate porn and fear mongering, and that is as much anathema to the scientific method as the idea of scientific “consensus.”

Who could have seen that coming?

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