Questions mount over climate spending, emissions scenarios
Call them absolutely gobsmacked.
The environmental movement is used to getting its way in the federal government, not to mention in the corporate media, but this year it’s been a tough, tough ride for the climate establishment, otherwise known—if we dig deep down through several layers of truth—as the Green New Deal scammers.
Shed no tears for them, for the scammer part is suddenly rearing its ugly head. The international climate apparatus has for years demanded huge expenditures, over-the-top regulation, and radical changes in energy policy in the name of fighting climate change. What it really was was an attempt by elites to impose fundamental changes in our daily lives from above and to line their pockets with “green” cash along the way.
Notably, changes in “our” daily lives did not include changes in theirs.
And they still can’t explain away the lack of basic accountability, both in the bottom lines of their bank accounts and in the trend lines of their climate modeling. That’s why, over time, most people, and even a few government officials, have opened their eyes. To that end, some of the movement’s most important institutions have taken hits, and three developments this past year illustrate just how far environmentalism has fallen.
One raises the question of whether the claimed emissions reductions associated with international climate spending have any rational connection to the real world at all. Another shows the Trump administration withdrawing federal support from an ostensibly prominent annual climate report while leaving the underlying scientific data intact. And the third is perhaps the most serious—the retreat from an extreme emissions scenario that critics say helped drive years of climate research, headlines, and public policy, not to mention the spending of countless billions of tax dollars.
Taken together, they represent the triangulation of money, institutional power, and scientific bias that helped build the modern climate-policy establishment but that is now degrading into itself, leaving little breathing political space inside.
CFACT sets out the facts
In August, David Wojick of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) examined the United Nations Green Climate Fund (GCF) database and found it to be a wonder work of make-believe. Many entries described as climate “projects” were actually financing platforms for anticipated rather than actual physical projects, Wojick discovered, even though they included specific estimates of carbon dioxide-equivalent emission reductions, as if the projects had been carried out, wrapped up, and quantified.
“Most are just specialized junior funds,” Wojick wrote. “Each has a supposed emission reduction number, but these numbers are just fantasy guesses since no actual projects are involved. Thus, the GCF emission reduction claims are fraudulent.”
Well, that’s blunt.
Wojick pointed to Project GAIA as an example.
“[The nearly $1.5 billion initiative] is a blended-finance platform providing long-term loans for climate adaptation and mitigation investments in 19 of the most climate vulnerable countries in the world—making funding accessible through sources previously unattainable to participating countries,” he wrote. “To answer to the immediate needs of developing countries, the platform allocates 70 percent of its portfolio investments towards adaptation projects; with a further allocation of 25 percent for Least Developed Countries and Small Island Developing States, ensuring that funding reaches the most climate vulnerable communities. The project targets countries facing similar challenges in accessing climate finance for their pipeline of high-impact adaptation projects.”
But it’s all a sham, Wojick contends, because the platform is a financial, not a physical, project, and yet it boasts a “CO2” equivalent reduction of 30 million tons.
“There is of course no physical basis for this reduction claim since no actual projects are involved,” he wrote. “Even worse, the GCF share of this $1.5 billion is a mere 10.3 percent. They should only be claiming this small fraction of the fantasy reduction amount, but I can see no indication that they are doing that. If not, then their CO2 reduction claim is doubly fraudulent.”
Or take a look at Global Subnational Climate Fund (SnCF Global)-Equity, which Wojick says runs through 2040. Wojick describes this as a $750 million fund targeting administrative units within countries such as counties, provinces, regions, and municipalities, to catalyze “long-term climate investment at the sub-national level for mitigation and adaptation solutions through a transformative financing model.”
“There are no actual projects, but the CO2 equivalent reduction is pegged at a precise 77.6 million tons,” he wrote. “This is less than $10 a ton which is completely unrealistic. The GCF financial share is just 20 percent.”
To put it analogously, it would be like establishing a $750 million economic-development fund and claiming it will create precisely 77,600 jobs before identifying which businesses will receive the money, the eligibility criteria, what they will build, or how many people each will employ. Wojick says his review of the first 40 database entries found them to be similarly financial, not physical, undertakings—in other words, phantoms of an operational assessment before rather than after the fact.
“The Green Climate Fund claims to be delivering billions of tons of CO2 equivalent emission reductions over its project life cycles,” he wrote. “The project numbers are completely fictitious and hence fraudulent.”
More Pie in the Sky: NOAA won’t sign the Arctic Report Card
Word came last week that the Trump administration has withdrawn NOAA’s administrative support for the Arctic Report Card, an annual peer-reviewed assessment the agency has published for 20 years. The report collates research on Arctic sea ice, temperatures, glaciers, vegetation, marine productivity, wildlife, and more.
According to the agency, NOAA scientists and programs will continue to mine and aggregate climate data, meaning the administration is not shutting down the underlying scientific research. What is ending is NOAA’s role in coordinating and facilitating the report itself.
Accordingly, truly valuable work will continue to be supported, NOAA stated: “The Global Ocean Monitoring and Observing Arctic Research Program will continue to support observations, models and products that contribute to national security, weather prediction, safety of navigation, and the economic vitality of coastal communities.”
For some reason, this has alarmed Arctic researchers and climate radicals, who accuse Trump of trying to gut Arctic science, and they have scrambled to continue to produce the report independently. That’s all well and good, given that data gathering continues and the data will remain publicly accessible.
The government is simply stepping away from lending NOAA’s credibility to a high-profile climate assessment produced largely outside the agency. Indeed, environmentalists say the loss of a formalized “report card” strips the data of the context needed to understand it. Specifically, NOAA will no longer support the non-NOAA “editors” of the data. In other words, NOAA will no longer supply support for ideological translation, and people will be free to make up their own minds.
The science establishment is terrified because they know it is the tip of the iceberg—the separation of a real science from the edited pseudoscience, not only its funding but also the label of official credibility, if government has any of that left.
The Scenario That Ate Climate Science
Here’s the beaut: RCP8.5.
In late April, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change publicly threw in the towel on Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5, or RCP8.5, the doomsday climate scenario that has dominated climate research and policy, saying it was “implausible.”
Oops.
- Sterling Burnett, director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at the Heartland Institute, argued in Western Journal that the scientific credibility of climate policymaking suffered a major blow with the admission. It sure did, as Burnett explained:
“This represented a tidal wave in the climate science and policy community,” Burnett wrote. “For more than a decade, the IPCC has treated RCP8.5 as the ‘business-as-usual’ pathway, projecting global temperatures to rise by 4.3 degrees Centigrade or more by 2100 with all manner of ‘end of the world’ results. The IPCC has wielded RCP8.5 like a cudgel during treaty negotiations to beat government climate negotiators into multiple unjustified climate treaties restricting the use of fossil fuels.”
The fact that RCP8.5 was “implausible” should have come as no surprise because many climate researchers were on the record noting from the outset that RCP8.5 was very unlikely and shouldn’t be treated as expected or business as usual, Burnett wrote.
“Yet that didn’t stop the vast majority of scientists publishing in the peer-reviewed literature and speaking to the mainstream media from treating it as such, calling on government leaders to impose a rapid transition away from fossil fuels in order to prevent the disastrous social, economic, and environmental outcomes that RCP8.5 forecast,” he wrote.
Not only had The Heartland Institute critiqued RCP8.5 from the start, Burnett wrote, it was not just implausible, but likely impossible.
“The IPCC and the lapdog media are treating this conclusion like it’s a new discovery, but it is not,” he wrote. “RCP8.5’s implausibility, indeed impossibility, was known to its promoters from the start, but instead of jettisoning it, they built a massive edifice of publications, laws, and regulations based upon its false predictions.”
Recently, Burnett wrote, the American Energy Institute, headed by Jason Isaac, created an entire website, “They-Knew.com,” dedicated to bringing to light the whole sordid RCP8.5 scandal. They-Knew.com, Burnett explained, is a comprehensive public record documenting the systematic misuse of RCP8.5. Here’s how Isaac described it, as quoted by Burnett:
“Scientists flagged RCP8.5 as unrealistic as early as 2017, published those warnings in the world’s most prestigious journals, and watched as governments, central banks, courts, educators, and advocacy organizations kept using it anyway. That makes RCP8.5’s promotion and seemingly continued use—since its repudiation by the IPCC, RCP8.5 has been used as a reference case in more than 70 peer-reviewed articles—one of the most consequential scientific integrity failures of the century.”
Yes, and now one of the great political failures ever because the continuing stream of exposes is uncloaking what the so-called environmental movement is, and what it seeks to do. As Burnett states: “Politically, the only honest and honorable result of this whole fiasco would be to rescind every treaty, law, and regulation enacted to prevent the harms forecast by the false RCP8.5—harms that we now know, if we didn’t before, were never realistic.”
So let’s recap. Critics of the Green Climate Fund have found that highly specific emissions reductions assigned to climate-financing programs are not measurable results but simply wish lists about what climate scientists want to be true. At NOAA, the underlying Arctic science continues, and the 2026 Report Card apparently will, too, but without being dressed in the federal government’s sheep’s clothing.
As for RCP8.5, an extreme emissions scenario that critics warned for years was implausible and has now been admitted as such even by its biggest proponents, it has done incalculable damage to the movement’s credibility, from which it will take decades, if not generations, to recover.
The common denominator is that environmental authorities are finally being asked to show the fruits of their scientific endeavors, and the work has come up woefully short. Maybe the climate movement would have been better off just saying the dog ate their homework.
That excuse might not have gotten them off the hook, but the fraud would have been a lot harder to prove than it is with the climate “science” they have been peddling.
