Andrew L. Urban
Just last week, I received the latest newsletter from the Australian Academy of Science, with a message from its new President, Prof. Sam Berkovic. After the opening pleasantries, he writes: “I take up the Presidency at a consequential moment for Australian science. Technological change is accelerating faster than our policy settings can absorb. Climate pressures are intensifying. Geopolitical shifts are reshaping how we collaborate and with whom.” That was the same week that the IPCC was communicating the opposite: ‘climate pressures’ have been so overstated as to be implausible.
But we can’t blame the well credentialled Prof. Berkovic, AC,FAA, FRACP, FRS; his primary area of expertise is epilepsy.
The high ranking of climate change among the topics surprised me and drew me further into the Academy website, to find that in the Academy’s section ‘Our Focus’, under ‘What matters now’, ‘Climate and environment’ are top of the list. Under Science for everyone, ‘The science of climate change’ is the first topic.
“This publication from the Australian Academy of Science aims to address confusion created by contradictory information in the public domain. It sets out to explain the current situation in climate science, including where there is consensus in the scientific community and where uncertainties exist.”
The Academy is still pumping out the old alarmist tropes: “Earth’s climate has changed over the past century. The atmosphere and oceans have warmed, sea levels have risen, and glaciers and ice sheets have decreased in size. The best available evidence indicates that greenhouse gas emissions from human activities are the main cause. Continuing increases in greenhouse gases will produce further warming and other changes in Earth’s physical environment and ecosystems.”
The latest advice from the IPCC means that disaster scenarios that use tipping points and a cascading collapse of ocean, land and forest systems, big rises in sea levels and heatwaves that render large areas of the planet inhospitable to human life this century should no longer be used to scare policymakers into action. Nor Academies of Science.
“implausible”
In fact, for decades many climate scientists have shown that the extreme scenario known as representative concentration pathway RCP8.5 to be highly unlikely, if not impossible. Not to mention the thousands of us who were denigrated as ‘deniers’. My own frustration battling climate alarmism (which I had been scoffing at since about 2015) boiled over into the 2022 book: Climate Alarm Reality Check (Wilkinson Publishing). Professor Ian Plimer had been at it for at least six years by then, with his highly acclaimed Heaven and Earth – global warming the missing science.
In historical climate terms, “we are living in boring times”, says geology professor Ian Plimer (Sky News, Outsiders, May 31, 2026)
The new move away from alarmism closer to reality comes in the form of a new paper by Van Vuuren et al. This states that the extreme scenario known RCP8.5 has “become implausible, based on trends in the costs of renewables, the emergence of climate policy and recent emission trends”. At the low end, many of the former emission trajectories “have become inconsistent with observed trends during the 2020-2030 period”. As many of us have been saying for years.
Roger Pielke Jr has called it “the most significant development in climate research in decades. This is an absolutely huge development in climate science which will have lasting impacts across research and policy. The future is not what it used to be.” (Great line!)
Pielke was a professor in the department of environmental studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on science and technology policy, the politicisation of science, government science advice, and energy and climate. He is also a research associate of Risk Frontiers in Sydney.
Pielke claims the revised advice to researchers and modellers as a victory for science.
As The Australian’s Environment Editor Graham Lloyd reports, “The World Bank’s Climate Change Knowledge Portal, which provides the climate diagnostics that feed into the country climate and development reports for more than 100 client countries, defaults to SSP5-8.5 and SSP3-7.0.
“The abandonment of the high-end legacy scenarios will need to propagate through this entire infrastructure,” Pielke says. “The policy machinery built on RCP8.5 and the other implausible scenarios is systemic.”
“attempt to cover their behinds”
“Pielke says users of climate models and model output based on legacy scenarios will now face decisions about if and how they’d like to realign with the latest scientific understandings as against continuing to rely on outdated research.
“Physicist Peter Ridd says “dropping RCP8.5 is a very big deal. RCP8.5 was always totally unrealistic and most of the cataclysmic predictions rely on it. Why has the IPCC done this now? It is not as though it is only recently that RCP8.5 has been shown to be a fairytale.
“Perhaps this is their attempt to cover their behinds, gently backtracking from the more crazy predictions as they see the world turn against them. Maybe they think becoming properly scientific is the best option to keep their jobs in the longer term.”
So, back to the Australian Academy of Science: among its numerous sections, the website asks the key question, Are human activities causing climate change?
It answers: “Human activities are increasing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. This increase is extremely likely to have caused most of the recent observed global warming, with CO2 being the largest contributor. Some observed changes in Australia’s climate, including warming throughout the continent and drying trends in the southwest, have been linked to rising greenhouse gas concentrations.”
It also states that “Since the mid-20th century, climate change has resulted in increases in the frequency and intensity of very hot days and decreases in very cold days. These trends will continue with further global warming.” AND ” Sea levels have risen during the 20th century. The two major contributing factors are the expansion of sea water as it warms, and the loss of ice from glaciers. Sea levels are very likely to rise more quickly during the 21st century than the 20th century, and will continue to rise for many centuries.”
In other words, the ruling orthodoxy. The ruling consensus. But of course, ‘consensus’ is the antithesis, the clowning of genuine science. Perhaps in the interests of full disclosure, it should be called the Australian Academy of Consensus Science?