Climate Change is Canceled

The worst predictions, at least, are being walked back. This is from lefty site Vox: 

The world that [doomsday scenario] RCP 8.5 assumed will never arrive. Global coal use isn’t on a path to quintuple; consumption has largely plateaued after decades of growth. Instead of the global population ballooning to 12 billion people, the UN’s current median forecast projects about 10.2 billion by 2100, with other reputable forecasts putting the number even lower. (All things being equal, fewer people means less emissions.)

At the same time, the clean energy transition moved faster than almost anyone in 2011 anticipated.... 

Was RCP 8.5 ever realistic? One camp of experts, led by climate scientist Zeke Hausfather and energy modeler Glen Peters, argues that RCP 8.5 was plausible in 2011, but was taken off the table by genuine policy and technology progress. The other camp, led by Roger Pielke Jr., argues that the rate of global decarbonization has been roughly linear for decades. That would mean we didn’t actively avoid RCP 8.5; it was just never realistic to begin with.... 

But, of course: 

But even if we’ve averted doom, there is a lot of work to do to secure a safer future....

The entire point of climate scenarios like RCP 8.5 was that there was no one certain future for climate change — only multiple possible futures. Whether or not RCP 8.5 was ever possible, the enormous advances in clean energy over the past 15 years are what made its retirement certain. Now we have new futures before us, waiting for what we do next. 

A lot of us have been very skeptical for a long time about the Climate Doom models. Those of us who have been around long enough remember the earnest Ice Age predictions of the 70s, the Acid Rain of the 80s that was going to melt away all our cities (sadly, the cities are still there), the Hole in the Ozone of the 90s (which closed long ago), the Global Warming that became Climate Change because the data just couldn't be made to fit. We remember the prediction that Glaciers National Park wouldn't have any glaciers by 2020; in 2020, they removed the signs that made the claim.

For me, I was always willing to entertain the idea up until people started using coercion. The Chronicle of Higher Education used to run both the excellent Arts & Letters Daily (they still do, and it's still worth checking out regularly) and a sister site called Climate Debate Daily. The latter faithfully reproduced both studies and stories that argued for climate change, and skeptical accounts that were also based on scientific methods. One day, however, that became impossible in academia: they could no longer allow skeptical voices a place in the discussion. At that point, I decided I knew enough to know that the discussion had departed from reason and become another racket. Using your social power to crush dissenting voices is never the mark of someone who is comfortably correct and on the side of reason; it's the way the weak of mind fight, not the strong.