What Just Happened?

After terrorizing an entire generation of children that the world was about to end (spoiler: it didn’t and won’t), the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) just ruled that the RCP8.5 computer model projecting “high emissions” is “implausible.”¹ That means all those apocalyptic scenarios that carbon emissions were going to boil the planet are now considered overblown computer models.

President Donald Trump, who — whatever you think of him — was one of the first world leaders to expose the climate change narrative and subsequent economic redistribution of wealth as a “scam” and the “greatest con job ever.” He wasted no time blasting the latest revelations, saying that, “the United Nations TOP Climate Committee just admitted that its own projections (RCP8.5) were WRONG! WRONG! WRONG! For far too long, Climate Activism has been used… to scare Americans, push horrible Energy Policies, and fund BILLIONS into their bogus research programs.”²

Chris Morrision at The Daily Sceptic, an online publication that has been exposing climate junk science for years, says “the implications of RCP8.5’s demise are vast”:

Activist-ridden science bodies such as the UK Met Office have brazenly used RCP8.5 to flam up weather predictions which in turn has led to onerous requirements being placed on British industry and finance. Politicians have been convinced by patently ridiculous claims and Net Zero rules and regulations have cascaded through the economy and society. All the politicised predictions need to be junked and all the resulting regulations reconsidered with a view to abolition. They are all based on assumptions that many at the time said were ridiculous and have now been officially marked as not wanted on voyage. Those inclined to be uncharitable might suggest it was all a hoax from start to finish.

The Daily Sceptic, May 14, 2026

Even with the IPCC’s latest admission, it seems that governments have long been aware of the duplicity and harm of their climate change initatives. The Daily Mail just reported that an internal dossier, acquired in Freedom of Information requests, reveals that the UK Government Labour Party admits the rush for Net Zero will come at the expense of the environment, but are pushing ahead anyway.

Bureaucrats admit the plans may destroy ‘nationally recognised sites, landscapes and historic environments’ as well as damaging ‘biodiversity and water resources’. Officials also confess his schemes may increase ‘air emissions, greenhouse gas emissions, noise and vibrations, light pollution, dust and soils.’

Daily Mail, May 16, 2026

All this is punctuated by Al Gore’s new prediction the week before that the world now faces impending “global cooling.”³ You can’t make this stuff up.

Meanwhile, Back in Canada…

The news that RCP8.5 projections are considered “implausible” made little apparent impact in negotiations between Prime Minister Mark Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith. The pair emerged with big grins from closed door meetings with an apparent “memorandum of understanding.” In short, Smith said the Feds agreed to a pipeline to the B.C. coast. In exchange, Alberta was required to raise it’s industrial carbon tax to $130 per tonne by 2040 and facilitate the construction of a $20-billion carbon capture and storage project. The deal will force large emitters like oilsands facilities and petrochemical plants to pay higher carbon taxes. The province is promising to spend up to $600 million to soften the blow.⁴

Dave Sawyer, an economist at the Canadian Climate Institute, said costs are likely to fall on public coffers due to the structure of Friday’s agreement.

The way they’ve designed this thing, there’s a higher risk that taxpayers will be on the hook.

National Post, May 16, 2026

And what was happening back home as the Premier shook hands with the Prime Minister in support of his global warming crusade? Literally four inches of snow was falling on the northern prairies in what continues to be a long, drawn out winter. You can’t make this stuff up.

Of course, the entire agreement between Smith and Carney is based on a false narrative that humans are the cause of “global warming” by global carbon emissions. The IPCC’s admission that these apocalyptic projections are now implausible is not exactly a surprise to climatologist, Dr. Judith Curry. Once a major promoter of the global warming narrative, she discovered that the modeling data was wrong, if not fraudulent, calling the entire climate change narrative nothing short of a “manufactured consensus.”⁵ In 2023, she was already predicting that the doomsday predictions of the IPCC were collapsing:

These extreme scenarios have been dropped by UN Conference of the Parties to the UN Climate Agreement.  However, the new Synthesis Report [of the IPCC] continues to emphasize these extreme scenarios, while this important finding is buried in a footnote: “Very high emission scenarios have become less likely but cannot be ruled out”… Clearly, the climate “crisis” isn’t what it used to be… The IPCC Reports have become “bumper sticker” climate science – making a political statement while using the overall reputation of science to give authority to a politically manufactured consensus.

“UN’s climate panic is more politics than science”, March 28, 2023, judithcurry.com

Now, it seemed that Premier Smith had a grasp on the phony science driving the Liberal Government’s clear aims to strand Alberta’s oil and gas in the ground.⁶ To a crowd of over 1300 at the UCP’s Leader’s Dinner in 2024, she declared:

Canada — Alberta included — does not need more punitive carbon taxes, does not need emissions caps, does not need net zero power grids. All of these things proposed by Ottawa, these ideas simply do not work.

Premier Danielle Smith, Leader’s Dinner, Calgary Alberta, April 3, 2024

But it seems the promise of a new pipeline has moved the goalposts. In particular is the Premier’s agreement to help build a carbon capture facility in the province (up where it was snowing the other day). The goal of this apparently planet-saving facility is to draw carbon dioxide from refinery emissions and liquify it through a series of chemical interactions. This liquified CO2, in turn, is to be sent down pipelines and forced kilometers into the ground into porous rock formations, such as depleted oil and gas reservoirs or saline aquifers.

But Andy Lira, Lead researcher of Clean Energy Group, says it’s exorbitantly expensive.

That means the taxpayers would be on the hook for billions of dollars to store carbon dioxide underground in Alberta…. In fact, the initial projects were experiencing cost overruns… Remember, all of this carbon dioxide has to be captured at the refineries around Edmonton, shipped to underground caverns and other parts of Alberta… And if it’s stored underground, it’s kind of like nuclear waste. It’s going to mean that taxpayers are going to have to pay huge amounts of money to store this carbon dioxide underground.

cf. CBC, YouTube

Lira also notes that these types of facilities transporting CO2 in this manner are dangerous, citing a carbon capture pipeline that exploded in Mississippi, sending dozens of people to the hospital in 2022.⁷

In fact, in a remarkable twist of irony, a former Liberal MP and one of the creators of the Pathways carbon capture project is now, herself, saying it’s economically unfeasible.

…the massive changes geopolitically as well as North America are the reasons why I have now recommended that we put a pause on the Pathways have now recommended that we put a pause on the pathways, on the carbon capture and storage part of the pathways initiative. That would be billions of dollars, billions of taxpayer dollars. That’s you and me and all your viewers. Taxpayer dollars, both at the federal and provincial level, and also billions of private sector dollars going into a massive project that puts carbon into the ground, does not generate any revenue.

Martha Hall Findlay, CBC, May 16, 2026; YouTube

But the most notable admission by Findlay is that, even were a carbon capture facility to be operating in the province…

…it also would be something that would be making virtually no difference to global emissions reduction at this point in time.

Martha Hall Findlay, CBC, May 16, 2026; YouTube

The curtain has been pulled away, and Mark Carney, with his “net zero” ambitions, is being seen for the wizard he isn’t. Or is he? He just got the Premier of Alberta to agree to a completely wasteful and nonsensical idea that even climate change proponents can no longer endorse. How is she going to find investors, much less build that pipeline now? I’m guessing Mark Carney knows this… and that his clearly stated goals in his book are very much alive and well.

To meet the 1.5°C [Paris Climate Accord] target, more than 80 per cent of current fossil fuel reserves (including three-quarters of coal, half of gas, one-third of oil) would need to stay in the ground, stranding these assets.

Mark Carney, Value(s): Building a Better World for All, Ch. 11

The Insanity of It All

Aside from the insanity of thinking that humans can vacuum CO2 from the atmosphere,⁸ the question is whether that’s even a good thing. According to numerous peer-reviewed studies, the planet is actually greening as carbon dioxide increases. Dr. Wallace Manheimer also points out that, “Over the period of human civilization, the temperature has oscillated between quite a few warm and cold periods, with many of the warm periods being warmer than today. During geological times, it and the carbon dioxide level have been all over the place with no correlation between them.”⁹

In a paper for the Global Warming Policy Foundation, Dr. Indur Goklany, who has previously represented the United States on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), says that the rising level of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere “is currently net beneficial for both humanity and the biosphere generally”.

Carbon dioxide fertilizes plants, and emissions from fossil fuels have already had a hugely beneficial effect on crops, increasing yields by at least 10-15 per cent.

Dr Indur Goklany, October 12, 2015, paper: “Carbon Dioxide: the good news“

Physicist Freeman Dyson states:

…there are huge non-climate effects of carbon dioxide which are overwhelmingly favorable which are not taken into account. To me that’s the main issue–the Earth is actually growing greener..it’s increasingly agricultural yields, it’s increasing forests, it’s increasing all kinds of growth… That’s more important and more certain than the effects on climate.

tomnelson.blogspot.com, April 6, 2016

A study in Nature has found that “woody vegetation cover over sub-Saharan Africa increased by 8% over the past three decades… These results confirm global greening trends, thereby bringing into question widely held theories about declining terrestrial carbon balances and desert expansion.”¹⁰ The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association reported a study in 2018 showing “Global plant growth surging alongside carbon dioxide.”¹¹ NASA’s mapping shows “that the world is greener than it was in the early 1980s.”¹² Boston University’s study found “significant greening of something between 25% and 50% of the Earth’s vegetated land.”¹³ Moreover, such greening actually cools the earth.¹⁴ There’s more studies along this same vein, but you get the picture.

All if this comes down to the unscientific and reckless demonization of carbon dioxide (see Undoing the Demonization of Carbon Dioxide). Nonetheless, it hasn’t stopped climate doomsayers from continuing their apocalyptic predictions:

2016. Guy McPherson (a climate change expert, scientist, and professor from the University of Arizona) says that there will not be any humans on the planet by 2026 due to the effects of climate change.

Trust the scientists. 😜🤣 pic.twitter.com/1Z8kElagAl

— MAZE (@mazemoore) May 15, 2026

1. cf. Is the IPCC’s Climate Extremism Dead?[↩]
2. x.com[↩]
3. msn.com[↩]
4. cf. National Post[↩]
5. cf. Renowed Climatologist Exposes ‘Manufactured Consent’[↩]
6. “To meet the 1.5°C target, more than 80 per cent of current fossil fuel reserves (including three-quarters of coal, half of gas, one-third of oil) would need to stay in the ground, stranding these assets.” ‚Mark Carney, Value(s): Building a Better World for All, Ch. 11[↩]
7. npr.org[↩]
8. Some carbon capture facilities sequester carbon from the atmosphere; others from the point of emission (ie. the smokestack) [↩]
9. Journal of Sustainable Development, February 2015[↩]
10. June 11, 2018, nature.com[↩]
11. noaa.gov[↩]
12. earthobservatory.nasa.gov[↩]
13. April 25, 2016, BBC[↩]
14. nasa.gov[↩]