Global CO2 emissions are well below the climate scenarios used to scare people – Watts Up With That?

From Dr. Roy Spencer’s Global Warming Blog

Roy W. Spencer, Ph.D

One of the main complaints that rationalists have about global warming projections is that the supposed “baseline” scenarios for future CO2 emissions are much higher than they actually are. As Roger Pielke, Jr., has pointed out, shown For years, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has made these exaggerated scenarios a top priority, and it looks like the next IPCC Assessment Report (AR7) will continue that tradition.

Although Roger does not believe that there are nefarious motives in this strategy, I do: The IPCC knows very well that as long as climate models are run that will produce extreme levels of climate change, there will be Few people question the assumptions that go into those model projections. . People’s careers today depend on the constant fear of a “climate crisis” (which has yet to materialize).

But I couldn’t find a good, recent chart that showed actual global CO2 emissions compared to those scenarios. So I made one. In the chart below, I show estimates of global CO2 emissions from fossil fuel use through 2023, and EIA’s five-year projections from 2025 to 2050 (in green). I also show the latest SSP (AR6) scenarios that are closest to the AR5 RCP scenarios. (To get the SSP scenarios to match actual emissions fairly well in the early years, I had to subtract the total SSP land use CO2 emissions from the total SSP CO2 emissions values.)

While emissions scenarios like SSP5-8.5 have been widely used to threaten humanity with climate model projections of extreme warming, this chart shows global emissions for many The past year (up to 2023) shows that the future will not look like that scenario.

(And, unsurprisingly, the “net zero emissions” goal by 2050 is a mirage.)

I encourage everyone to sign up for Pielke Honest broker substack, where he discusses this and related issues in great detail.