To the extent that climate deniers have gotten organized in responding to this week’s UN IPCC report — unequivocal in stating that climate change is here, now, real bad and our fault — they’ve coalesced around Roger Pielke Jr.’s RCP 8.5 conspiracy theories. It's mostly just Pielke saying modeling of high-end emission scenarios that show what will happen if we burn all the fossil fuels available is no longer the “business-as-usual” trajectory ... because renewables are increasingly replacing coal and gas. But by talking about that as if it's a secret conspiracy, he turns nuanced equivocating into culture-war fodder for his far-right audience.
Marc Morano mentioned it obliquely in one of his Fox News hits, CEI’s reaction relied on Peilke’s approach, and he himself tweeted a link to a Koch-funded Reason dot com post picking up Pielke’s premise that — since the worst possible scenarios where we burn all the fossil fuels are unlikely — there’s no reason to worry about our current trajectory (in which we burn merely most of the fossil fuels, and terrible things still happen, but rich people can buy their way out of it, so the hit to GDP won’t be globally debilitating).
This approach, however, relies on audiences understanding discussions of various projections based on fossil fuel emission concentration scenarios being described as “business-as-usual” and not “fossil fuel dependence.” And that is probably ... a bit too complicated for their base. So, professional deniers are scrambling to find other ways to downplay the report.
For example, a post on Watts Up With That gives up on the pretense that we’re not warming, and instead embraces the apocalypse, at least for Australia. Eric Worrall responds to RenewEconomy coverage of the IPCC report, which points out that temperatures in his native Australia have already risen 1.4°C, by wondering what’s the big deal about 1.5°? “My question,” Worral writes, is “when should we expect to see something unusually bad happen?”
He then goes on a short tangent about how Stephen King once advised that suspense is more terrifying than horror itself, that “what’s behind the door or lurking at the top of the stairs is never as frightening as the door or the staircase itself.”
Worrall compares this to warming, asking “when nothing much happens” after hitting that 1.5°C warming mark, and business as usual resumes, “when life goes on as normal, what then?”
But these past years at 1.4°C of warming have not been normal for Australia.
In the 2019-2020 brushfire season, no doubt amplified by record heat of 118°F that is becoming more frequent as the world warms, 34 people’s lives stopped altogether when they were killed by the fires, while 44 million acres of land were burned and one estimate pegged the wildlife loss at a billion animals. “Apocalyptic scenes in Australia as fires turn skies blood red,” read a New York Times headline, followed by “thousands of people fled from their homes as wildfires raged on the last day of the warmest decade on record in Australia.”
As the wildfire season ended, Australia’s woes didn’t. The droughts that precipitated the fires (pun intended) dried out the ground so much that when a series of strong storms brought heavy rain, it caused massive flooding.
Maybe we’re biased, but scenes from an apocalypse of drought then fire then floods are generally the sort of thing most people would describe as “unusually bad,” right?
But, in a way, Worrall is right about life going on as normal, because look how quickly people like him can forget all that. And it’s not just him. The Australian government is still gung-ho on fossil fuels, to the point where protestors spray painted “duty of care” on the country’s Parliament House. CNN’s coverage by Ben Westcott and Angus Watson ends with a quote from the government promising that “action will be taken against those who have committed” the grave offense of spray painting a message, “reiterating that his government,” Wescott and Watson wrote, “had ‘a plan’ to reduce Australia’s climate change emissions but refused to commit to a ‘net zero’ target by 2050.”
Sigh. Business as usual.