Climate models used to justify costly policies were based on an 'implausible' scenario
Tom Harris, executive director of the International Climate Science Coalition, joins the show to discuss the controversial RCP8.5 emissions scenario and its enormous influence on climate policy.
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For years, governments and activists have warned of catastrophic global warming while using climate models to justify carbon taxes, emissions restrictions and sweeping changes to the way Canadians produce and consume energy.
But what happens when some of those frightening projections were built using a scenario researchers themselves now describe as implausible?
On this episode of The Gunn Show, I’m joined by Tom Harris, executive director of the International Climate Science Coalition, to discuss the controversial RCP8.5 emissions scenario and its enormous influence on climate policy.
RCP8.5 (Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5) assumes extremely high future greenhouse gas emissions, including massive increases in coal consumption and no innovation. But it became a frequently used scenario in climate research and helped produce projections of roughly four to five degrees Celsius of warming. It was a doomsday scenario.
Scientists have been warning for years that those underlying assumptions were unrealistic. Even recent research from scientists involved in developing emissions scenarios for the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has similarly described such high-emissions pathways as increasingly implausible.
Yet Harris says research relying on these extreme scenarios continues to appear and is used to craft everything from government policy to financial risk for banks, lenders, and insurance companies.
Tom and I discuss how RCP8.5 became embedded in climate research, government policy and public debate, and why Canadians were sold costly climate policies using worst-case projections that were never particularly likely to happen.
GUEST: Tom Harris, executive director of the International Climate Science Coalition.
