“In the period 1982-2019 we have observed a decrease in cloud cover from 64 % to 61%.
This means that the Earth has received significantly more solar radiation.
This may well be the main explanation for the observed temperature increase of about 0.7C during this period.”
Prof Ole Humlum
University of Oslo
They take the raw data and "correct it" by cooling the past to make the appearance of warming more alarming.
https://x.com/shellenberger/status/2059 ... 96247?s=20Michael Shellenberger
@shellenberger
Climate policy prevented the IPCC’s high emissions scenario, say the media. It didn’t. The scenario was never possible as it predicted burning 5x more coal than is known to exist, even as natural gas was replacing it. The IPCC must be radically reformed or shut down.
Governments, banks, and corporations across the developed world have for nearly four decades treated the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as the final word on the science of climate change.
The Obama and Biden administrations regulated carbon dioxide as a pollutant on the strength of IPCC findings. The European Union built its emissions trading system around IPCC scenarios. The United Kingdom anchored its 2008 Climate Change Act in projections drawn from the panel’s reports.
Central banks established a Network for Greening the Financial System that now requires more than 140 supervisors to stress-test banks against IPCC-derived futures. Asset managers wrote trillions of dollars in environmental, social, and governance funds on the assumption that the panel’s high-end scenario described the world’s likely path.
Local governments along American and European coastlines planned seawalls and zoning rules around IPCC sea level numbers. Insurance companies repriced risk on the same models.
That assumption has now collapsed. In April 2026, the scenario committee that supplies the IPCC’s Seventh Assessment Report, known as ScenarioMIP, published a paper that concluded that “on the high-end of the range, the CMIP6 high emission levels (quantified by SSP5-8.5) have become implausible…”
In other words, the worst-case future that has anchored climate science for fifteen years describes a world that cannot exist. Scenario “RCP 8.5,” and its successor SSP5-8.5, generated more than half of the references in the 2018 U.S. Fourth National Climate Assessment. They accounted for nearly 60% of the references in the IPCC’s Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere. Thirty new studies per day are published based on RCP 8.5.
The IPCC’s defenders insist that the world dodged the apocalypse because of climate policy. A modeler told Carbon Brief that RCP 8.5 had “become implausible, based on trends in the costs of renewables, the emergence of climate policy and recent emission trends.”
Berkeley Earth’s Zeke Hausfather argued that “it is incontrovertible that rapid cost declines, investment in, and deployment of clean energy technologies in the past 15 years have changed the plausible scenarios for fossil fuel use later in this century.
These new scenarios reflect this success.” Robert Vautard, co-chair of the IPCC’s Working Group I for the upcoming Seventh Assessment Report, said that the previous high scenarios “started in 2015 and assumed no climate policies, but there ARE now many climate policies in many countries, developed in particular with the Paris Agreement,” and the retirement of RCP 8.5 “shows that climate mitigation policies do consistently reduce global warming.”
Michael Mann of the University of Pennsylvania said on X, “The good news is emissions are now tracking below older ‘business-as-usual’ pathways because of climate policy in spite of Trump.”
But that story is false. RCP 8.5 was never plausible, and the people who built it either knew or should have known. A 2017 paper by Justin Ritchie and Hadi Dowlatabadi in the journal Energy showed that the scenario assumed roughly an eightfold expansion of global coal consumption by 2100, far exceeding five times proven coal reserves, based on extrapolating early-2000s Chinese coal growth rates indefinitely into the future.
Coal’s share of the global energy mix peaked around 2013 and has fallen since, the opposite of the RCP 8.5 trajectory. The scenario also assumed a dramatic expansion of coal-to-liquids technology to replace petroleum, a technology that the United States and other industrialized economies abandoned in the 1980s when the collapse in oil prices killed off the Carter-era Synthetic Fuels Corporation.
None of those assumptions reflected what serious energy analysts were saying in 2011, when the scenario was finalized. The American shale gas revolution had already been underway for half a decade. Between 2005 and 2022, U.S. carbon emissions from electricity generation fell by roughly 35%, with more than 60% of that decline driven by switching from coal to natural gas.
In 2021, Roger Pielke Jr. and his coauthors found that observed emissions had been running below the RCP and SSP baseline scenarios for two decades, primarily because of slower-than-projected carbon intensity growth, not climate policy. As Pielke put it recently, “RCP8.5 is not simply ‘highly unlikely,’ it is falsified, meaning that its emissions trajectory is already well out of step with reality. We knew that in 2020.”
IPCC’s scenario builders thus broke their own definition of a scenario, which the IPCC’s 2000 Special Report on Emissions Scenarios defined as is “a coherent, internally consistent, and plausible description of a possible future state of the world,” and RCP 8.5 was none of those things....
All of the above aside, I will type once again: everyday anthropogenic factors or actions by the common citizenry (typical everyday humans anywhere/everywhere) have NO impact on "climate change".
One of numerous egregious lies/scams of the modern era.
