After a chilly month, England may record its hottest May day since records began next week, beating a previous high set all the way back in 1944.
As if on cue, the Climate Change Committee (CCC) quango produced a report this week declaring: ‘British way of life under threat from heat, flood and drought.’
The CCC – established back in 2008, when Ed Miliband was climate change secretary under Gordon Brown – is supposed to be an objective adviser to the Government on policy. Instead, it behaves like a hysterical pressure group, and a powerful one at that.
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, it seems 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.
CCC Chief executive Emma Pinchbeck has a salary of approximately £200,000
‘This new report sets out a comprehensive package of solutions to address the growing impacts of climate change affecting every aspect of life in the UK,’ the committee says. ‘We are already seeing disruption today – and, without action, these risks will escalate.
‘By 2050, 92 per cent of homes are likely to overheat, peak river flows will be up to 45 per cent higher and water-supply shortfalls could exceed 5 billion litres per day.’
In order to combat overheating homes, the committee says we will need more air conditioning. This is true, although good luck relying on all our new wind farms to produce the necessary electricity on hot, still days.
But the rest of this doomsday report is full of howlers. It states emphatically that, by 2050, ‘sea levels will be [not “could be” or “may be”] 20–45cm higher around UK coasts than today’.
That implies sea levels will rise over the next 24 years by 8mm to 19mm per year. But over the 35 years we have had satellites measuring them, 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 some deceleration since then: a 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 the climate committee justify this hysteria over sea levels? This is slightly technical, but worth laying out in full.
In the small print of its report, it admits it bases its sea-level prediction ‘on a high-emissions scenario (RCP8.5), using the upper-end estimate (95th percentile)’. What does that mean?
RCP8.5 is an economic scenario that was produced in 2011 by a team of mathematical modellers and assessed by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The modellers’ aim 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.
How might this happen? 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 as much coal in 2100 as the world did in 2000, and projecting that half of all the world’s energy would be supplied by coal by the end of this century.
Nigel Topping’s CCC Chair salary is around £36,000 for 36 days’ work
Julia King, Baroness Brown of Cambridge, is a CCC Adaptation Committee Chair with a salary of £19,800 for 36 days work
Yet even this back-to-coal fantasy was not enough to achieve the gargantuan emissions the modellers were tasked with producing. So they assumed that the world’s population growth would also reverse its current slowdown, surging to 12billion people by the end of the century; that innovation to make our lives more fuel-efficient would largely end; and 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’.
One of the Climate Change Committee’s own members, Professor Piers Forster, wrote an article just this week ‘on the death of RCP8.5’, as the scenario is not set to feature in the next lot of IPCC reports. Nobody, at all, ever, under any circumstance, should be using RCP8.5 to forecast the climate.
Yet the CCC is still using it to terrify the Government and the British people – even taking its ‘upper-end estimate’! Worse, the committee continues to rely on RCP8.5 not just for sea-level rise but for temperature itself, specifically claiming that global temperatures will rise by 4C by 2100.
Again, these projections are not borne out by the best current data. As a major modelling study last year put it, ‘the chance of the most catastrophic climate change, above 3C, has gone down substantially, from 26 per cent to 9 per cent.’
To put it another way, the world has a 91 per cent chance of not seeing a 3C rise by 2100, let alone one of more than 4C. While the rest of the scientific world has been steadily downgrading the risk of rapid warming, Britain’s climate commissars blithely ignore them.
Such alarmism is not just wrong but costly – to us taxpayers. Buried in the Climate Committee’s new report is a reference to ‘UKCP18’.
This is ‘UK Climate Projections 2018’, a Met Office report modelling the climate in Britain and globally until the end of the century. This report, too, relied heavily on the now-discredited RCP8.5.
Go to the Met Office website and you will still see UKCP18 predicting an up to 6C rise in summer temperatures by 2070, adding ‘we base these changes on the RCP8.5 high-emissions scenario’.
UKCP18 is still being used by the government to decide all sorts of things, such as whether to build near the coast, what restrictions to place on traffic, what kind of trees to plant and even how much to spend on ‘community engagement’, whatever that might be.
By projecting implausible future harm based on discredited data, it justifies unaffordable spending by you, the taxpayer. The new climate committee report even includes a calculation that up to £17million more will have to be spent on cutting back trees from growing into power lines in 2050 – basing this estimate on (you guessed it) RCP8.5.
While the committee forecast 4C of warming by 2100, it also forecast 2C by 2050. Yet, interestingly, the report says we have already experienced 1.4C of warming, which means we are 70 per cent of the way to 2050 levels. (Incidentally, all these temperatures are relative to pre-industrial levels, rather than to today.)
Is the current climate disastrous? No. So does another 0.6 of a degree (mostly at night and in winter, according to greenhouse-gas theory) sound like a catastrophe? Again, no: it just makes us a bit more like France and a bit less like Iceland.
Sure, we will get episodes of bad weather like we always have. But with the exception of sudden downpours and heatwaves on land (worse inside cities because of the ‘urban heat-island effect’, which explains why built-up settlements of concrete and asphalt tend to be several degrees warmer than underpopulated rural areas), there is little evidence of more extreme weather.
The new report also claims ‘storms will have stronger extreme winds’ and talks confidently about ‘the rising number of droughts’. But the most recent IPCC report clearly states a genuine ‘signal’ of climate change (that is, any change in climate greater than those to be expected from natural variations) has ‘not yet emerged’ for floods, drought, severe wind storms, tropical cyclones, sand and dust storms, heavy snowfall, ice storms, hail, avalanches, coastal flooding or marine heat waves.
In plain terms, this means the IPCC itself is saying it is impossible to identify which, if any, of these major climate events are being caused by man-made climate change, and which are just ‘noise’ to be expected through natural climatic variation. If the BBC has given you the opposite impression, complain.
Death rates from such weather events are in fact sharply down, by around 98 per cent in a century worldwide: thanks to shelter, transport and communication – all of them reliant on fossil fuels.
The public, rightly, has learned after four decades to take the apocalyptic warnings of climatecrats, amplified by a credulous media, with a pinch of salt.
In 1972, a Guardian headline told us that ‘space satellites show new ice age coming fast’. In 1989, a top UN official warned that ‘entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000’.
Sir John Houghton, former head of the Met Office, described global warming in 2003 as ‘a weapon of mass destruction’. In 2004 British climate scientist David Viner said ‘children aren’t going to know what snow is’.
In 2010 the National Trust told us to expect to replace our lawns with gravel, our oaks with olives and apple orchards with banana plantations.
In 2014, the BBC ran a fictional news report from a typical day in 2020: ‘Health, transport and water supply industries face serious decisions to cope with heatwaves and droughts.’ The film was later removed from the BBC’s website after the summer of 2020 proved wetter than average.
In 2018 Greta Thunberg tweeted: ‘A top climate scientist is warning that climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years.’ In 2023 she deleted her tweet.
Yesterday, it was reported that ministers had accepted the Climate Change Committee’s recommendations to set a legally binding goal of cutting carbon emissions by 87 per cent by 2040 – one of the most ambitious such targets anywhere in the world. ‘This is a fight we’re happy to have,’ said Labour, brushing aside concerns from the Tories and Reform that arbitrary net-zero goals are pushing up living costs.
Climate change is happening – but beware those, such as the powerful climatecrats of the CCC, with a vested interest in exaggerating its future impacts.
- Matt Ridley is an acclaimed science writer whose books include The Rational Optimist
- Additional Reporting: Simon Trump
