Matt Ridley expands on a recent Daily Mail article on the antics of the Climate Change Committee’s latest “findings”:
The British public has been propagandized to believe the most extreme risks are far more common than they really are … even in the way the weather is reported.
In my Daily Mail essay on the @theCCCuk‘s new report, I point out that they have a vested interest in exaggeration.
“Between the moment when these climatecrats wake in the morning and the moment they lay their overworked brains to rest on feather pillows at night, they have one all-consuming ambition: to maximise their own budget.
They achieve this goal by being as alarmist as possible.
Imagine if they found evidence that climate change was no big deal or even good news: would they want to publish this? Of course not. It would be disastrous for their (taxpayer-funded) income.
The committee has never produced a report on global greening: the remarkable 15-20 per cent increase in green vegetation on the planet over the past four decades, caused mostly by carbon dioxide emissions.
Nor do its members talk about falling deaths from cold weather anywhere near as much as they do about the smaller number of deaths from hot weather.
Good news for us, in short, is no news for them.
The report is full of howlers. It states emphatically that, by 2050, ‘sea levels will be [not “could be” or “may be”] 20–45 cm higher around UK coasts than today.’
That implies sea levels rising over the next 24 years by 8mm to 19mm per year.
But over the 35 years we have had satellites measuring it, sea levels have risen on average by just 3.4mm per year. There was a little acceleration in 2015-2020 and there has in fact been a deceleration since then: 4.5mm increase per year since 2010 and 3.7mm per year since 2015. (In some parts of the country, such as East Anglia, the land is sinking, a different effect.)
So to assume that the rate of sea-level rise could more than quadruple within the next quarter-century is completely unscientific. Neither Greenland nor Antarctica is losing ice at an accelerating rate — and they are the only possible sources for such a huge increase.
How, then, does @theCCCuk justify this hysteria over sea levels?
It bases its sea-level prediction “on a high-emissions scenario (RCP8.5), using the upper-end estimate (95th percentile)”.
RCP8.5 is an economic scenario that was produced in 2011 for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) by a team of mathematical modellers.
Their instruction was to find out what it would take to increase CO2 emissions at a rapid rate to a very high level by the end of the century.
First, the modellers said, the world would have to massively increase the use of coal at the expense of oil and gas — using coal to make fuel for cars and planes, burning eight times much coal in 2100 as the world did in 2000, and projecting that fully half of all the world’s energy would be supplied by coal by the end of this century.
Yet even this back-to-coal fantasy was not enough to achieve the gargantuan emissions the modellers were tasked with producing. So they assumed both that the world’s population growth would also reverse its current slowdown, surging to 12 billion people by the end of the century, that innovation to make our lives more fuel-efficient would largely end, and also that we wouldn’t even try to cut emissions.
None of these are going to happen.
Scientists have been saying for more than a decade that the apocalyptic RCP8.5 scenario is extremely unrealistic, and even the alarmist BBC said in 2020 that it was “exceedingly unlikely”.
The IPCC has recently announced that it is abolishing RCP8.5 altogether, while one of the Climate Change Committee’s own members, Professor Piers Forster, wrote an article just last week “on the death of RCP8.5”.
Nobody, at all, ever, under any circumstance, should be using RCP8.5 to forecast climate. Yet the CCC is still using it to terrify the government and the British people – and even taking its “upper-end estimate”!
Same as it ever was.
Comment by Mike Porter — May 24, 2026 @ 11:56