Charles Rotter
A scenario the modelers built as a stress test became, for fifteen years, the scenario the press treated as your future. It has now been quietly retired. The reckoning has not yet begun.
There is an old joke in physics. A dairy farmer hires a theoretical physicist to improve milk production. The physicist disappears for six months, returns with a 200-page report, and announces: I have a solution. It works for spherical cows in a vacuum.
The joke endures because every physicist has met the spherical cow. To make a hard problem tractable, you strip the real world down to a geometry the math can handle. A round, frictionless object floating in nothing is something you can actually compute. A real cow is not. The simplifying assumption is a tool. useful inside the laboratory and the seminar room, useless the moment it walks out the door.
RCP 8.5 was a spherical cow. For fifteen years it walked out the door, into headlines, into government reports, into court filings, into bank stress tests, and into the climate fears of hundreds of millions of people who had no idea what it was. As of April 2026, the international committee that produces the official climate scenarios for the United Nations has quietly walked it back into the barn and shut the door behind it.
The retirement, in the form of a footnote
On April 7, 2026, Geoscientific Model Development published van Vuuren et al. 2026, the design paper for the next round of climate model scenarios, the inputs that will feed the IPCC’s Seventh Assessment Report (AR7) and the climate research of the rest of the decade. Buried inside is the verdict that closes the book on a decade and a half of climate communication: in the authors’ own characterization,
the CMIP6 high emission levels (quantified by SSP5-8.5) have become implausible.
That is the formal obituary, written by the same scientific community that wrote the birth certificate. The new CMIP7 framework eliminates the three extreme scenarios, RCP 8.5, SSP5-8.5, and SSP3-7.0, that have dominated climate research, climate journalism, and climate policy since the early 2010s.
The announcement was met, in the English-language press, with a silence so complete that Roger Pielke Jr., who has been documenting the misuse of these scenarios in the peer-reviewed literature for years, spent the first two weeks of May simply cataloging which mainstream outlets had not yet covered the story. The list was nearly all of them. Coverage finally arrived, more than a month after publication, only when the President of the United States posted about it on social media. The New York Times, the Washington Post, the AP, Bloomberg, and Carbon Brief then all ran stories within forty-eight hours, most of them framed around the President rather than the science, and most repeating the same factual errors about what RCP 8.5 had ever been.
To understand why that matters, you have to understand what RCP 8.5 actually was, and what it was not.
What it was: a high-signal input for a noisy machine
The cleanest description of what RCP 8.5 was built for came from an unnamed climate modeler quoted recently by Pielke. Asked why the extreme scenario became so dominant in model intercomparison runs, the modeler explained that most modelers do not pay close attention to the socioeconomic assumptions underlying any given scenario. What they need is an input that drives a climate model. In the modeler’s words:
a higher signal is better from a signal/noise perspective.
At ten to a hundred thousand dollars per model run, a higher-emissions scenario produces a cleaner climate signal you can analyze. Lower scenarios require many more runs to pull the signal out of the natural variability. Choices have to be made.
In other words, RCP 8.5 was useful to physical climate modelers in roughly the same way the spherical cow is useful to a graduate student studying angular momentum. It made the math tractable. It was never meant to be a forecast. It was a stress test, a deliberately extreme number you plug in so you can compare model outputs and study the climate system’s response to a large radiative forcing.
The original 2011 paper that introduced RCP 8.5 (Riahi et al. in Climatic Change) said as much: a baseline at the upper end of the published literature, assuming a roughly sevenfold expansion of global coal use through 2100, a population trajectory at the high end of UN projections, and effectively no technological progress in low-carbon energy. Even at the time, this was understood to be an outlier. Keywan Riahi, the lead author, now tells Seth Borenstein of the Associated Press:
it was never a likely case.
Zeke Hausfather, on a recent panel hosted by Andrew Revkin, conceded essentially the same thing, that the 2011 energy modeling literature had been clear about what RCP 8.5 was: a high-end statistical bookend, not, as he put it,
a particular likely outcome.
If that is what Riahi and Hausfather believe now, and what the literature said in 2011, it raises a question. Why was Riahi’s scenario quietly promoted from “outlier baseline” to “business as usual” in the IPCC’s Fifth and Sixth Assessment Reports, in the U.S. National Climate Assessment, in central bank stress tests, and in fifteen years of climate journalism?
And why did nobody, at any of those institutions, including the modeling community itself, shout?
The cow escapes
The transformation from stress test to forecast happened by gradual institutional drift, not by deliberate decision. The IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report in 2013 designated RCP 8.5 as the reference scenario. Once a generation of impact studies, vulnerability assessments, and policy papers had been written under that assumption, the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report in 2021 inherited a body of literature so saturated with RCP 8.5 that disentangling it was no longer possible. The Sixth Assessment included mealy-mouthed language acknowledging the scenario was unlikely while continuing to feature it prominently throughout.
By that point, RCP 8.5 had become the implicit baseline for almost everything readers were being told about the climate future. It was the source of nearly every “by 2100” headline of the past decade. According to Pielke’s accounting, RCP 8.5 accounted for over half the scenario references in the 2018 U.S. Fourth National Climate Assessment, around sixty percent in the IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere, and roughly a third of all RCP references in the IPCC AR5. By early 2020, peer-reviewed studies invoking it were appearing at a rate of roughly twenty per day. So far in 2026, even after the formal retirement, they are appearing at thirty per day.
This was not an obscure technical artifact. It was the engine of the climate-alarm story for a generation.
It also became the basis of policy. Pielke’s tabulation runs to dozens of pages. National climate impact assessments in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, Australia, Japan, and the Netherlands all use RCP 8.5 or SSP5-8.5 as a reference scenario. The Network for Greening the Financial System framework, used by more than 140 central banks, built its “Hot House World” stress test on it, which then flowed into the bank capital tests run by the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, the U.S. Federal Reserve, and others. The World Bank’s Climate Change Knowledge Portal, which produces the climate inputs for Country Climate and Development Reports in more than 100 nations, defaults to SSP5-8.5 and SSP3-7.0. The pending climate-damages lawsuits against U.S. energy producers, including Multnomah County’s $51 billion claim, are built on damage projections derived from RCP 8.5 modeling.
And during all of this, prominent voices in the climate establishment were not quietly hedging. In a 2021 forum reply published in Issues in Science and Technology, Chris Field, co-chair of IPCC Working Group 2 for the Fifth Assessment, and Marcia McNutt, then president of the National Academy of Sciences, defended the description of RCP 8.5 as a “business-as-usual” pathway as something that, in their words,
remains 100% accurate.
That sentence, by the official position of the scenario community that designs these things, is now false.
Where were the modelers?
The deepest question this retirement raises is not how RCP 8.5 was built. Its construction was always documented in plain sight; anyone willing to read the 2011 Riahi paper could see what it assumed and why. The question is why the people who built it, and the people who used it, sat in silence for fifteen years while it was bastardized.
The modelers were not deceived. They knew what they had made. They knew the difference between an exploratory high-forcing case and a forecast. Hausfather himself, in the same panel discussion cited above, acknowledged that the 2011 energy modeling literature was clear about what RCP 8.5 was. The information was never hidden. It was simply ignored, first by the impact community, then by journalists, then by central bankers, then by federal courts. And the people who knew better said nothing.
Consider the moments at which speaking up would have mattered.
When the IPCC AR5 made RCP 8.5 the reference scenario in 2013, the modeling community had standing to object. They did not. When the U.S. National Climate Assessments of 2014 and 2018 built their headline projections on it, the scenario authors had standing to clarify. They did not. When central banks began constructing stress tests around a “Hot House World” calibrated to RCP 8.5, the scientists whose work was being repurposed for bank capital regulation had standing to push back. They did not. When the IPCC AR6 in 2021 again featured RCP 8.5 throughout its assessment, while including buried language warning that it had become unlikely, the lead authors could have insisted on a clearer correction. They did not.
When Roger Pielke Jr. and Justin Ritchie published their formal diagnosis of scenario misuse in Energy Research & Social Science in 2021, the response from senior figures in the climate establishment was not gratitude for a needed correction. It was, in the case of Field and McNutt, an active defense of the indefensible. Pielke and Ritchie spent the next five years being characterized in mainstream coverage as marginal critics rather than as the people who had been correct all along.
The few who did speak up, Pielke, Ritchie, Matthew Burgess, Steven Koonin, Richard Tol, and a small handful of others, paid the social and professional costs of speaking up. The much larger group that knew, and stayed quiet, did not pay those costs. They are now, in May 2026, beneficiaries of a course correction they did not lead and a quiet retirement that contains no admission of error.
This is not a story about scientific fraud. It is a story about institutional cowardice and the sociology of a discipline whose career incentives, funding pipelines, and journal access were aligned with letting a false framing run unchallenged. The technical scientists who could have stood up at any point during the past decade and said this is not what our scenario means, and made that clear in the public square, not just in cautious footnotes, did not do so. The professional cost of being branded a “denier” was apparently too high; the cost to the public of letting the bastardization continue was paid by someone else.
Pielke writes that science is self-correcting. On a long enough timeline, that is true. But science self-corrects through the work of individuals willing to take the personal risk of contradicting a consensus, not through the passive accumulation of new data inside a silent profession. The reckoning here is not just that RCP 8.5 was wrong. It is that the modeling community knew, and waited, and is now being credited with a correction that arrived only after the costs of denial had become higher than the costs of admission.
The reckoning that hasn’t started
What does it mean, in practice, that the foundation has now been declared unsound?
Every reader of this site has spent fifteen years being told, in increasingly dire language, what the climate of 2100 will look like. A great deal of that language was downstream of RCP 8.5. The 2026 retirement does not erase those projections from the journalistic record, but it does change how a thoughtful reader should weigh them on the way back through the archive. The “by 2100, coral reefs collapse” story; the “by 2100, the U.S. economy shrinks ten percent” story; the “by 2100, ice-free Arctic, climate refugees, mass extinctions, civilization-threatening heat” stories, a substantial fraction of these were the spherical cow’s footprints across the cultural landscape.
The new CMIP7 framework brings the high end of the scenario set down considerably. Pielke’s apples-to-apples comparison using the FaIR climate emulator finds the new HIGH scenario produces about 0.9°C less warming than SSP5-8.5 by 2081–2100. Compared to the IPCC AR6’s projection of SSP5-8.5, the gap widens to about 1.4°C. The implausibility of the upper-end legacy scenarios, in his phrase, means
the future is not what it used to be.
But the cleanup is not complete, and on this point the WUWT reader should pay close attention to where Pielke and the official scenario community part company. Three observations matter.
First, the new HIGH scenario is itself still implausible by the standards Pielke and his coauthors have proposed in the peer-reviewed literature. It inherits the SSP3 storyline, including a 2100 global population the IIASA recently revised upward to 14.5 billion, a number that exceeds every contemporary demographic projection and is driven primarily by an assumed 35% upward revision in Africa’s 2100 population.
Second, the new MEDIUM scenario, which van Vuuren et al. describe as a current-policy trajectory, produces higher cumulative emissions through 2100 than the IEA’s current-policy scenario produces by 2050. On the IEA’s own numbers, today’s policy trajectory delivers roughly 2.5°C of warming by 2100. The new MEDIUM delivers more. Calling it a “current policy” scenario is, charitably, a stretch.
Third, the mainstream coverage that finally arrived in May was not a reckoning. The first wave of New York Times, Washington Post, AP, Bloomberg, and Carbon Brief coverage uniformly described RCP 8.5 as the “worst-case” scenario (it was a baseline scenario), attributed its retirement to the success of renewable energy policy (it became implausible because its core assumptions about coal expansion and demographic trends were always wrong), and framed the story around President Trump rather than around fifteen years of institutional error. Pielke’s verdict on the coverage, in his most recent post: the outlets that built years of stories on RCP 8.5 chose to
minimize and deflect.
The lesson
The lesson here is not that climate scientists were stupid or dishonest. The modelers who pulled RCP 8.5 off the shelf because it gave them a clean signal were doing what physical scientists routinely do. It is their subsequent lack of action to correct the record as necessary that screams monumental cowardice. The spherical cow has its place. The trouble begins when the spherical cow is wheeled out of the lab and presented to the public as if it were a real cow, and then wheeled into the Federal Reserve and presented to bank regulators as the cow you should be valuing your loan book against, and then wheeled into a federal courthouse and presented to a judge as the cow whose damages an energy company should be required to pay.
That is what happened. The official scenario community has now admitted, in the formal scientific literature, that the cow was not a cow. They have done so in a footnote, with no apology, after a decade and a half of silence from the broader profession that knew, or could have known, all along. The press that built a generation of front-page stories on it has so far chosen not to notice.
The next time you read a headline about climate change and the year 2100, whether it appears in the New York Times, in a central bank report, or in a complaint filed in federal court, the first question to ask is which scenario the projection rests on. If the answer is RCP 8.5 or SSP5-8.5, you are reading about a spherical cow.
The barn door is shut. The cow has gone back inside. What remains is the trail of damage it left while it was out, and an open question about why so many people in a position to stop it kept walking past the open door.
Footnote: At this point it is safe to say the climate models are moooot. [Anthony]
Troughers gotta trough .
What will they try next ??
TFK_bams09 and all the ubiquitous clones are based on a Fourier’s spherical averaged cosmic poo model contrary to the reality, i.e. lit hemisphere heated at 1,368W/m^2, 957.6 w albedo & heat lost all directions 24/7, 957.6/4=239.4.
Schroeder physics is garb…
Please stop, Nicholas. Just stop. 🙄
Instead of replying individually, I will comment on yours. You are absolutely correct that a simple primary school average is inappropriate. Insolation arrives as a sine function from sunrise to sunset. GHG’s at a given concentration don’t deal with just a ridiculously small value of radiation as 240. A given concentration of 400 may intercept much of the outgoing radiation at 240 but intercepting 900 outgoing at maximum is a different story. One must factor in the problem of as insolation increases so does outgoing radiation.
Which leads to another problem. Insolation is absorbed by the surface soil/oceans. Not all of that insolation is rebroadcast. Heat remains at depth for a substantial length of time and reduces outgoing radiation.
Can a simple radiation diagram based on grade school averaging and simple addition/subtraction give a viable description? No, it can not. There needs to be mathematics much more sophisticated such as calculus integration to fully explain the intricacies of the earth’s system and its processes.
“Not all of that insolation is rebroadcast.” Of course that is true on a day/night clouds/no clouds/variation basis…but these cartoons are based on years of averages…so you are analogous to saying that sea level varies with tides and waves which is true if you are wading on the beach…but NOT what is “Sea level” to a geophysicist, geologist, paleontologist…the list goes on…
You miss my point. Oceans can store heat for years and centuries, far longer that the records we have. Land does store heat longer than a day, month, or year.
Most importantly, radiation out is proportional to the insolation received, in other words, to temperature. You cannot do an arithmetic average, even a long term one, and obtain a correct answer of an exponential function. Those functions are curves. They do not have linear changes as you move up and down the curve, which is what a simple average predicts.
“years of averages”
Averages of what? Averages of other averages?
If you want the total of anything you have to do an integration of the base, not an arithmetic average of other averages which hide variability, especially if the functional relationship is not linear or it is cyclical.
Nyquist also applies here. When cycles are decadal or even longer (meaning centuries) we don’t have a long enough period of samples to resolve the fundamental frequencies involved.
I haven’t read the article yet, but I laughed out loud at the title, remembering one of the manifold flaws of the GHE theory that pretended to compensate arithmetically for only half the planet receiving sunlight and much of that oblique.
Well if you integrate for cosine of your “obliquity” angle from North Pole to South Pole and from Sunrise to sunset….and average over the spherical surface….you get a ratio of 4….which of course is the same ratio as the area of a sphere…to the area of that sphere’s shadow…so the cause of your laughter is exactly what again ?
Look at an ideal system with a perfect sphere and the sun directly over the equator. Let’s assume a value of 1000 W/m² reaches the surface.
A point on the equator will be receiving no radiation until sunrise. At that point in time, it will begin to receive a value of 1000 W/m² × sin(1°) = 17.5 W/m². It will progress for the next six hours until 1000 W/m² × sin(90°) = 1000 W/m². Over the next six hours to sunset the amount will decay back to zero in a sine function. Every point following the chosen point will experience a similar variation. Ultimately, over 24 hours, every point on the equator will experience the same variation of insolation.
In the limit, every point on the equator will receive the average of a sine function over 24 hours. Note, this is an average of the values, not of the area under the curve which a simple integration will give you. The equation is:
f(avg) = [1/(π/2)]∫sin x dx |0 to π/2 which equals 0.64. That is for the upgoing interval. For the interval from π/2 to π, you obtain the same value. So the average of the total is 1000 × 0.64 = 640.
For the average value from the equator to one pole is basically using the same formula except using a cosine instead of a sine. Lo and behold, the value of an average of cosine from 0 to π/2 is also 0.64.
So, we can now determine the average from the equator to the pole is;
640 × .64 = 410 W/m². Putting this into the SB equation gives 291K or about 18°C.
Now let’s do a calculation using an albedo of (1 – 0.3) and 1360 W/m².
1360 × 0.7 × 0.64 × 0.64 = 390 W/m²
(390 ÷ 5.67×10⁻⁸)⁰.²⁵ = 288K = 15°C
Where did the greenhouse warming go?Maybe a simple arithmetic average and dividing by 4 is not quite the correct answer.
TFK_bams09 and the ubiquitous clones assume a spherical model for ISR.
This is Fourier’s ball suspended in bucket of average warm cosmic poo which even Pierrehumbert says is no good.
Your numbers are the right averages, but nobody except junior high school science teachers uses a “spherical model” that assumes a constant surface temp all over the globe…and they only use it for illustrative purposes… Maybe try Modtran…
TFK_bams09 & clones do just that when they divide 1,368 ISR by 4 to get 342.
Also assume 16 C global temperature when calculating 396 BB.
Yes Junior….still try Modtran…the locality options…
From the article:”The lesson here is not that climate scientists were stupid or dishonest.”
Yes they were. The purloined emails prove they were both.
That wasn’t the modelers.
I suspect many of the modelers were mathematicians trained in computer programming of complex equations. They did not create the equations; climate scientists did along with the data to be fed into the computers. My guess from seeing warmists posts here had any sophisticated training in the physical sciences, i.e., applied physics, analytic chemistry or engineering thermodynamics. Climate sciences ignorance of uncertainty is palpable and a good indicator of their lack of sophistication in physical science. The blind leading the blind.
They might have some rudimentary programming background, but there isn’t much evidence of any software engineering or computer science.
Frankly, scientists shouldn’t be allowed within 100 miles of a programming language. Modularisation, abstraction, numerical methods and version control are completely foreign to them. They also tend to be clever enough to wreak major havoc because they don’t realise what they don’t know.
Whether they know it or not, it is data mining and data dredging run amok. Ignore all the assumptions based in statistical analysis and metrology and just search, or even modify data, to find support for your hypothesis. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.
Some quotes from Freeman Dyson, a renowned scientist.
I have bolded two sentences that are very important. Climate modelers focusing on radiation and CO2 in the atmosphere miss entirely the larger picture. It is like zooming in to a single car in a race. It may appear to be traveling at great speed while every other car is passing it.
When was the last time you read a paper or study about what the optimal temperature of the earth should be? Are we approaching it, are we currently at it, or have we surpassed it. Imagine focusing on the rpm’s of a motor while the damn car is stuck in 1st gear. I recently read a discussion of a peer reviewed paper extolling biologists to expand their studies into the microclimates that species endure. Will more heat make them more active, expand their range, or simply require modifications to their routines. The practice of just blaming “climate change” in general for possible variations in habits just wasn’t cutting it scientifically.
Quote:
The professional cost of being branded a “denier” was apparently too high; the cost to the public of letting the bastardization continue was paid by someone else….
…The reckoning here is not just that RCP 8.5 was wrong. It is that the modeling community knew, and waited, and is now being credited with a correction that arrived only after the costs of denial had become higher than the costs of admission.
(Comment by this blogger: The meaning of FRAUD is deceit, trickery; specifically: an act, expression, omission, or concealment. OK, should we be polite and only wonder about the possibility that the entire consensus alarmist community, especially the IPCC, could be considered lying by omission)?
Good article overall.
However, on this point,
“What does it mean, in practice, that the foundation has now been declared unsound?”
One must step back. The RCP8.5 scenario and its close relatives were simply exaggerated versions of a fundamentally implausible claim.
That unsound claim is the expectation, with its modeling assumption hard-coded into all of the emission and social pathway scenarios, that rising concentrations of CO2 MUST operate as a climate system “forcing” to which amplifying “feedbacks” arise.
In my view, a clear demonstration of the unsoundness of this framing is from the ERA5 reanalysis model. That is why I keep posting about the hourly “vertical integral of energy conversion” parameter. In short, it is shown that the increased static IR absorbing power of the 2XCO2 case is massively overwhelmed by dynamic energy conversion within the general circulation. This is the proper context in which to address the scientific question. There is no good physical reason to expect sensible heat gain on land and in the oceans as a “forced” result, and most certainly there is no way to isolate the radiative effect for positive attribution of a “warming” trend.
Full explanation here, with references and visualizations.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1PDJP3F3rteoP99lR53YKp2fzuaza7Niz?usp=drive_link
A single annotated plot here to make the point concisely.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1knv0YdUyIgyR9Mwk3jGJwccIGHv38J33/view?usp=drive_link
Youtube version here (sorry about the leading ads – I did not ask for that!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDurP-4gVrY
Skeptics of climate alarm should be careful not to take the bait that the projections using the moderated scenarios are any more valid than for the now-retired extremes. Let’s not concede the core implausible claim.
Oh, one more thing – it was also a fundamental error to have ever employed time-step-iterated, parameter-tuned-to-hindcast, pre-stabilized, large-grid, discrete-layer, computer climate simulations to run scenarios purporting to represent the influence of incremental CO2, CH4, N2O. The rapid buildup of uncertainty should have been acknowledged from the start as disqualifying as a tool for the investigation of a minor trend.
Thank you for your patience in these important matters.
David, I have been saying something very similar for a long time, that energy movement by bulk air transfer absolutely smothers any tiny theoretical radiative effect of enhanced atmospheric CO2.
Very please that you were able to show this with actual data. 🙂 🙂
Keep posting it until people realise this fact.
Any possible CO2 effect is nothing but a “flea-bite on an elephant’s posterior”
I have also said many times, that ANY scenario that uses enhanced atmospheric CO2 as a driver, is a load of codswallop… a FANTASY, a MYTH.
“There is no good physical reason to expect sensible heat gain on land and in the oceans as a “forced” result, and most certainly there is no way to isolate the radiative effect for positive attribution of a “warming” trend.”
You can’t use arithmetic averages with exponentials, especially when the exponentials are time functions that generate gradients. So even if you could define CO2 as a “forcing”, it can’t be handled the way climate science does it.
“Oh, one more thing – it was also a fundamental error to have ever employed time-step-iterated, parameter-tuned-to-hindcast, pre-stabilized, large-grid, discrete-layer, computer climate simulations to run scenarios purporting to represent the influence of incremental CO2, CH4, N2O.”
As Freeman Dyson pointed out, you HAVE to analyze the biosphere as a holistic unit, you can’t isolate one or two components to look at and expect to understand what is happening to the whole. E.g. did the modelers include the CO2 sink increase caused by increased greening? Doubtful since they didn’t even understand that the greening was going to occur. It might be a small incremental over each individual time-step but it is an accumulating function over time.
A mouthful of truth! When they don’t even realize that the initial condition data has a large uncertainty, why would they worry about any other uncertainty.
Is this the beginning of the end for the climate catastrophe cult???
I believe certain Trump executive orders marked the beginning of the end. The big shifts have come as UN has been defunded. It was their globalist agenda that kept/keeps it going.
Very nice. I have always said there are important and influential people in academia, science, government and journalism who have always known that much of the CAGW work was nonsense and they did nothing. The more important thing is that for many of them there was a reason they did nothing. They had a lot to lose by speaking up even though they knew they were right. There are very powerful people in all these professions who knowingly forced their ideology onto their colleagues even to the point of being fired and blackballed. That is BS of the highest order. We know who these monsters are we need to publicly call them out fire and or blackball them. What they did was really, really bad, they need to be punished.
Nice report. Do we now have to deal with a cubic cow?
I don’t think the sperical cows are back in the barn. I suggest they are rolling downslope toward a creek, and will, someday, end in the ocean to be remembered like a bottle of aged milk on the way to oblivion.
No, Picasso did that for us.
Climate science is cows all the way down
Engineers have their own type of spherical cow. We were taught early on to make parts of equations that could be assumed to have little impact on the final results to be equal to zero or one. I found great joy in zeroing or oneing out terms that were difficult to compute.
CMIP7 is near death.
Australia’s CSIRO has sacked 6 modellers from its ACCESS team. I am uncertain if there was US funding supporting their efforts but it could be the cause of cutting jobs in this area.
I was hoping to attend an ACCESS CMIP7 workshop at the end of August because they have opened it for public involvement:
ACCESS Community Workshops 2026 | ACCESS-NRI
That may not now happen. Or allowing public input may be looking for more private funding.
There are big problems looming for CMIP7. It is now widely known that ocean surface cannot sustain more than 30C so that makes all CMIP6 models WRONG. And the ocean heat content in the SH is decelerating and could actually be losing heat by 2030. So “global warming” will be soon limited to the NH.
Then there is the 20% staff reduction at the UN thanks to POTUS Trump. The UN is on borrowed time in its present form. That will kill the IPCC. Energy security has always been the important factor and it is back in centre stage.
Rick,
When you go to the work shop at the end of August, you should hand out copies of the home page of the late John L. Daly’s website:
“Still Waiting For Greenhouse” available at:
http://www.john-daly.com. He was the first citizen-scientist to show that CO2 did cause any global warming by analyzing the temperature data from over 200 weather stations located around the world.
Since I can only attach one image to comment see my next reply your comment.
NB: If you click on the image, it will expanded and become clear. Click on the “X” in the circle to contract the image and return to comments.
Only place you find chimps in Australia are the zoos, universities and places like CSIRO
So the “sheltered workshop” called the CSIRO has been squeezed a bit.
Maybe the BoM’s outrageous $96.5 million website revamp cost had to be covered somehow.
My niece would have done that in under 2 months and only charged the taxpayers ~ $40k.
(But she doesn’t have any “Labor mates” to “grease the wheels” for her.)
Rick,
RE: CO2 Does Not Cause Warming Of Air.
Shown in the chart (See below) is a plot of the average annual temperature in Adelaide from 1857 to 1999. In 1857 the concentration of CO2 in dry air was ca. 280 ppmv (0.52 g CO2 /cu. m. of air), and by 1999 it had increased to ca. 368 ppmv (0.72 g of CO2/cu. m.) , but there was no corresponding increase in air temperature in this port city. Instead there was a cooling. Darwin had also had a cooling. In 1857 Tav was 17.2° C and by 1999 it was 16.7°C.
To obtain recent Adelaide temperature data I went to:
https://www.extremeweatherwatch.com/cities/adelaide/average-temperature-by-year. The Thi and Tlo temperature data are displayed in a long table from 1887 to 2025. The computed Tav for 2025 was
17.4° C. Since measurement error is +/- 0.1° C, it is concluded that there has been no warming of air in Adelaide for 168 years.
This empirical data and the over 200 charts from John Daly’s website falsifies the claims by the IPCC that CO2 causes global waring and climate change. The reason CO2 does not cause warming of air is quite simple: There is too little CO2 in the air to absorb out-going long wave length IR to heat up the air.
Currently at the Mauna Loa Obs. in Hawaii, the concentration of CO2 is 431 ppmv. One cubic meter of this air has mass of 1,290 g and contains a mere 0.85 g of CO2. Please note how little CO2 there is in there air. You should mention this at the conference.
Here is what you should know about the IPCC. The IPCC was formed by the UNEP and the WMO in 1988 and was given this mandate: to determine if the greenhouse CO2 cause global warming and if activities of man cause global warming and climate change. Guess what? That is what they claim to have determined and thus ensuring the continued maintenance and generous funding of this now corrupt UN organization. We don’t need the IPCC and it should be disbanded. Look at the harm it has done the UK, Germany, Australia, California, and New York State.
PS: To access the temperature charts at John Daly’s website from the home page go to the end and click on “Station Temperature Data”. On the “World Map” click on “Australia”. There is displayed a list of stations. Click on “Adelaide”. Click the back arrow to display the list of the weather stations. Click the back arrow again to display the “World Map”.
BEST found Adelaide West Terrace to be heavily contaminated compared to other regional stations. Up to the early 1960s in particular, before there appears to have been a location move or instrument change or similar, BEST identified a warm bias of almost +0.5C on average. The data you show appear to be the raw data that retain this bias.
After breakpoint alignment analysis, BEST revised what had appeared to be a cooling trend in the raw data from West Terrace into a warming trend of +2.27C per century (+0.23C per decade) which was in line with regional expectation (+0.2C per decade).
BEST was initially hailed here at WUWT – until it was published showing exactly the same global warming trend in the temperature record as every other surface temperature producer who ever examined it.
The quality-controlled BEST data for Adelaide up to 2020 is shown in the chart below.
Lol
There is no “step” that can be isolated to a move or instrument change. The x-axis is in years. Any change such as a move or new instrument would be immediately clear.
Best uses an algorithm that is designed to “find” a breakpoint that can be used as a reason to adjust data. You need to explain why the trends after about 1960 have totally different slopes. Even if the absolute temperatures were different, the slopes of the trends should be similar.
Bias is a systematic error. It requires a correction factor derived from a calibration procedure. Unless the original station contained such a systematic error and it was discovered by a calibration, any other assumption is pure speculation, even if a computer algorithm says it is so.
Yes there are. The BEST alignment methods are published in the peer reviewed literature. If you can debunk them then go and do so there; don’t make comments you can’t substantiate on blogs.
I can debunk them because a systematic bias was not discovered by a physical calibration. Adding a corrective bias is a guess, a speculative idea.
The proper way to treat it is to stop and freeze the original data series and to begin a new one. Don’t splice them by creating an uncertain bias.
You need to tell us why there is a need to create a “new” series rather than simply deal with two separate series.
If 1960 is when the so-called change occurred, that is 66 years ago. That is twice the 30 years period for determining a climate change.
Again, why the need to create an artificial long series. Can you provide a mathematical reason for doing this.
You will *NOT* get an answer to this. I do not trust BEST. Not when I found out that some of the BE data is shown with measurement uncertainties in the tenths digit as far back as the 1700’s even after being recorded at the integer digit.
“Alignment methods” is just Newspeak for guessing at the Great Unknown. It’s what carnival hustlers do with their foggy crystal balls.
It’s hotter or it’s colder who cares nothing is going to change until the free market finds something better/cheaper than fossil fuels and renewables certainly aren’t it.
As you say, that’s irrelevant to the points being made regarding unreliable raw data.
You should consider preparing copies of my two comments and passing them out to the attendees.
Rich:
“CIMP7 is near death.” It is near death in the same sense as Frankenstein. The true believer Alarmists will not go away quietly: too much of their self-image is involved, not to mention their livelyhood, fame and political power.
Cribbing from another wuwt comment of mine regarding CIMP7:
“The Alarmists have been lying for 15 years about the plausibility of RCP8.5. Now that the lie no longer works, the current lie is we can retire RCP8.5 because of all the benefits & emission changes from our climate policies. Hah! They just ignore the Keeling Curve and the miniscule amount of total energy wind/solar provide (and the hideous costs!).
Next up will be the lies associated with “attribution science”. A co-founder of the World Weather Attribution [WWA] group [Friedericke Otto] has been named lead author of the upcoming AR7 report on extreme weather. The May 2026 edition of Physics Today interviewed her.
Here are two quotes:
“She is motivated, she says, by wanting to show that “climate change is here and now and not something that happenes somewhere else and sometime in the future.” ”
“I also work with legal scholars on how to translate scientific evidence into legal evidence…”
Seems to me her bias is showing [probably why AR7 picked her], and an underlying reason the WWA was formed [to foment lawsuits against the energy industry].
Roger Pielke has written on “attribution science” in his The Honest Broker substack blog. Well worth a look.
The old King is dead [RCP8.5]. Long live the new King! [Attribution]. “
They sacked a lot more than just that
https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/fears-for-australia-s-climate-change-adaptability-as-csiro-cuts-over-90-environment-research-jobs/ar-AA23HXOm
Should change it to RIP8.5 !
“This is not a story about scientific fraud.” Except, at minimum, in the cases of Chris Field and Marcia McNutt.
“It is a story about institutional cowardice and the sociology of a discipline …aligned with letting a false framing run unchallenged.”
Doesn’t that sound familiar.
mRNA gene-therapy is safe and effective, ditto.
Spike mRNA is a vaccine, ditto.
Masks protect grandma, ditto.
Ivermectin is a horse de-wormer & hydroxycholoroquine is ineffective, ditto.
Sars-Cov-2 is from a Chinese wet-market, ditto.
2-week lock-down to flatten the curve, a laughable ditto.
The southern border is secure, ditto.
DEI does not affect merit, ditto
Gender is sex is fungible, ditto.
Institutional cowardice, absence of principle, betrayal of professional ethics, and the sociology of mass formation. The emergent plague of our times.
I’m sure there are more.
For the Climate Liars, the ends justify the means. RCP8.5 did its job – frightening people to turn away from fossil fuels and toward Retardables. It did it so well that it did itself out of its’ own job. It can now be retired, sans farewell, retirement party, or gifts, but simply the pleasure and knowledge of a job well done. The Climate Industrial Complex will be forever grateful. They have other “scenarios” which can step in now. That’ll do cow, that’ll do.
I fear there may have been a 100% consensus among 97% of the scientists affiliated with the IPCC that it was better to go on TV and eat canapés at fancy receptions than to risk ruining one’s life by trying to “play the hero.”
It is, alas, an entirely rational choice, socially speaking.
“This is not a story about scientific fraud.”
Yes it is.
“study the climate system’s response to a large radiative forcing.”
What “large radiative forcing” would that be, exactly? The one from the Sun? There aren’t any others that I can see. Or measure.
Not only that, but climate models are unfit to “study the climate system’s response” to anything.
The entire climate modeling enterprise is a hack job.
The transfer of wealth out of the pockets of innocents under the guise of climate change has been huge.
Society needs to expand its coverage of what constitutes a criminal offence.
The corrective measures must include punishment of offenders.
Without punishment, offenders continue to offend.
Some comments above name Marcia McNutt, Chris Field and F. Otto. There seems to be a reluctance to investigate them because the field of work is related to the hallowed green concept of dominance of preservation of the environment. They should be investigated in the same way that corporate accountants are when suspected of cooking the books. The difference is that the financial scale of book cooking is typically tiny compared to the scale of climate change money movements.
Punishments are being neglected. There is a wide need for them. For example, the nonsense being taught to youngsters at schools is being done by people who have purposely captured control of curriculum content. Enormous damage has already been done through deliberate miseducation. It has to be stopped. Punishment might be the only effective tool.
Geoff S
I’m with you, Geoff.
There is no excuse for climate scientists that have ignored the uncertainties associated with the data they use. Every time initial conditions are input to a model, the uncertainty should also be included and used to calculate the end uncertainty. Doing otherwise is either ignorance or purposeful. IPCC lead authors should be held accountable and dismissed from their positions and censured for not requiring detailed uncertainty budgets and propagation throughout. No other physical science discipline or certified laboratory would get away with reporting results without this being known.