EDITORIAL: Climate alarmists call worst-case scenario ‘implausible’

Questioning apocalyptic climate forecasts is now the conventional wisdom.

For years, radical climate activists have painted a bleak view of the future. Most scientists believe that burning fossil fuels releases greenhouse gases, which remain in the atmosphere, and that these gases trap additional heat, which warms the planet. This has led to concerns about “global warming.” But when the Earth didn’t warm as quickly as some dire prognosticators projected, the term “climate change” became more widely used.

Many Democrats argued it was a life-and-death issue.

“I’ve seen firsthand what the reports made clear: the devastating toll of climate change and its existential threat to all of us,” Joe Biden said in 2023. Former Vice President Kamala Harris once called climate change “an existential threat to us as a species.”

Those claims were always dubious, a cover for an agenda that sought more central planning over the U.S. economy.

As Bjorn Lomborg wrote in 2024, over the past century, the average number of annual fatalities from climate-related disasters has “plummeted by an astounding 98 percent. It is crucial to consider that the world’s population quadrupled during that same period.”

But real-life data and decades of failed doomsday predictions didn’t slow the alarmism. “Earth has 12 years to avert climate change catastrophe, warns U.N. report,” CNN reported in 2018.

Based on such claims, progressives in America and around the world pushed a revamp of the world’s energy production. In many Western countries, they succeeded. Wind and solar power plants replaced coal and natural-gas power plants. The result has been higher prices for less reliable power.

This decades-long effort has indeed reduced emissions in America and the European Union compared with 1990 levels, the year set in the Kyoto Protocol. But it hasn’t stopped a sharp increase in global emissions. In 1990, global emissions were 22.7 billion tons. In 2024, they topped 38 billion tons.

Even so, a group of climate scientists now say the worst-case scenario projections, commonly referred to as RCP 8.5 and often used to justify drastic action regarding energy use, “have become implausible.” This lays the groundwork for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to set aside this projection going forward.

In a different world, those who pushed these doomsday scenarios would face professional consequences. In this world, they’ll claim that this isn’t new information.

Leftists frequently talk about trusting “the science.” It’s time for them to take their own advice. Stop using implausible scenarios to scare young people and the gullible with claims about global catastrophe due to future global temperature increases.