An article at substack EnvironMental blows the whistle on the alarmists now deserving the label they long applied to climate realists and skeptics. The New Deniers. 

It’s about time the climate cabal was forced to wear their own pejorative.

“The Church of Carbon” is a term Doomberg coined several years ago to describe the cabal of scientists, legacy media, environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs, aka non-profits), activists, celebrities and others who denominate every issue through the lens of CO2 emissions and “climate change.” Members have a variety of terms to describe anyone who challenges the prevailing view that “climate change” is a catastrophic problem for earth and humanity, and “flat earther” is not even close to the most derogatory.

More than twenty years ago, the Church’s most ardent and vocal priests
and apostles began to paint heretics with the term global warming “denier.”
The not-so-subtle term is an effort to shut down those who would dare question their religion.

The choice of term is not accidental. It attempts to liken climate religion heretics and apostates to those who deny that the Holocaust – the WWII stain on the history of humanity that killed six million Jews in the 1940s – ever occurred.

The deranged “logic” goes something like this: paint those who question what “the science” says with a term so ugly that they are simply beneath inclusion in any rational, civil debate over matters of such importance. “The opinions of people who deny things like “climate change” or the Holocaust are not worthy of consideration in the public discourse over policy,” or so it goes.

The now two-decade pattern of using the term “denier” in this matter is worse than ugly. It shamefully denigrates the death and suffering of millions, and with the subtle wink of an eye attempts to conflate the act of asking legitimate scientific questions with human atrocities.

Educated scientists, politicians and legacy media who should have known better than to believe using the term “denier” would allow them to avoid directly answering hard questions. The strategy was never going to succeed in the long run, and the history of science is replete with examples of its laughable failure. See the Catholic Church, Copernicus and Galileo and the earth-centric view of the universe, for starters.

Last month we published the news that the most apocalyptic scenarios of future GHG emissions used by the world’s climate scientists and research organizations have officially been tossed in the trash heap, deemed by the very cabal that created them as “implausible.”

Near the close of Implausible Deniability we posed a few questions (emphasis added):

…will the scientific community admit their errors and change course? Tens of thousands of research papers have relied on the now discredited high emissions BAU scenarios, including RCP8.5 and SSP5-8.5, across all six emissions scenario frameworks. Will politically motivated climate scientists continue to push for their relevance as “reference” scenarios?

What about the legacy media? Having published tens of thousands and to possibly over a hundred thousand articles depicting these cremated scenarios as the “business as usual” trajectory the world was on, with every adverse weather event held as evidence of the forthcoming climate Armageddon, and fear their cheapest and easiest sell, will they admit that the truth was not what they chose to present?

It only took a bit more than a month after the news first broke before the answer became clear. What is the Church of Carbon and its priests, apostles and book publishers saying? How are the “implausible” scenarios being portrayed and even defended? Grab your giant soup spoon. It’s time to give some very deserving folks a dose of their own medicine.

The sky-is-falling scenarios were implausible from their conception because
they were grounded in unrealistic assumptions about energy, economics,
or demography (population/birth rates). And despite these clear errors,
the people who built them and are now defending them know it.

But based on the reactions from most of the scientific establishment, explainer media, and climate‑policy world, you’d think the only reason the apocalyptic emissions scenarios known as RCP8.5 and SSP5‑8.5 are now “implausible” is because heroic climate policies and “cheap renewables” saved earth and humanity in the nick of time. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Global carbon intensity peaked in 1960 and has been steadily falling ever since, with no discernible change in the rate since any of these measures. If “climate policies and cheap renewables” have made a material impact, it cannot be seen in the graph above.

[In the last 25 years world energy consumption from oil, coal and natural gas has fallen a whopping three percentage points from 86.1% of total to 83.2%. That is why no changes in the trend of carbon intensity can be seen in the first graph above. Also bear in mind that in 2025 the light green Renewables energy is only 60% wind and solar, the rest mainly biomass.]

The message that “we saved ourselves from the worst case” is politically convenient even as it is scientifically laughable. It’s a two-step dance the very climate research community that portrayed the very same scenarios as “business as usual” might have gotten away with but for the tireless work of researchers like Justin Ritchie, Hadi Dowlatabadi, and Substack publisher Roger Pielke, Jr.

Put simply: Climate policy and “renewable” energy didn’t retroactively
make the high emissions scenarios RCP8.5 and SSP5-8.5 unrealistic.
They were never realistic from their conception.

This is the history the new “implausible thanks to renewables and policy” narrative is trying to omit. But it is the storyline put forth in most explainers that were rushed out to cover the high GHG emissions scenarios’ implosion. [ The article provides several examples of dismissive media stories, including a Michael Mann tweet, Gavin Schmidt at Real Climate Science, Marshall Shepherd at Forbes, and coverups at NY Times, Washington Post and AFP, all of which failed in the same way.]

Absent from all of their pieces was a candid reckoning with the fact that the “business as usual” path required energy, economic and demographic contortions that were never remotely likely, even without climate treaties or “renewable energy” subsidies.

The ENGO’s fared no better. The Center for Progressive Reform – apparently tipped off to the upcoming van Vuuren et al paper announcing the new ScenarioMIP group’s dropping of the high emissions scenarios – said RCP8.5 (and by extension is successor, SSP5-8.5) “remains not only legitimate, but crucial..”

CPR argued that scientists using the high emissions scenarios “are not out to shock or deceive; they are simply following the best science.” Even if the pathway is implausible, the authors insist, using it “is not misleading.”  This is a distraction from the reality that the implausible scenario was the basis  “business as usual” rhetoric that scared the public into believing 4–6 °C of warming by 2100 was what happens if we don’t pass the next climate bill. And the one after that.

Carbon Brief also looked the other way.  John Cook and Ken Rice at SKS accused critics of “bad faith” absent any admission that the assumptions embedded in RCP8.5 or SSP5-8.5 years earlier were erroneous.

If these actors were actually interested in doing so, they should explicitly acknowledge that RCP8.5/ SSP5‑8.5 were erroneous by specification – not just rendered implausible by virtuous policy. They would stop treating as bad‑faith actors legitimate critics who specified very precise plausibility concerns a decade ago (that turned out to be correct).  And they would revise impact assessments, “Social Cost of Carbon” estimates, and financial sector stress‑test designs that were built on what the scenario designers themselves now call implausible futures.

We close by pointing out the delicious and unavoidable irony. For nearly two decades, all of these scientists, legacy media “journalists” and editors, and ENGOs have been screaming “denier” at anyone who challenges the prevailing narrative. Yet here we stand, with the UN’s own scenario development function deeming “implausible” the exceedingly high GHG emissions scenarios on which these people and institutions based their endless use of the pejorative term denier.

Consider the second and third order consequences of scaring the world with the always- farfetched, high GHG emissions scenario projections: Young people are declining to have children based on misplaced fears their kids will have no future. $5 trillion (and counting) has been spent on “solutions” that could not possibly fix an apocalyptic crisis that does not exist. Soaring electricity costs and two lost decades refusing the one electricity generation technology in the advanced world (nuclear) that is GHG emissions free while subsidizing “renewable energy” technologies instead.

The New Deniers™ are the actors that enabled all of these outcomes, are still pretending that RCP8.5 and SSP5-8.5 are important, valuable, or relevant.  In actuality, they were never anything more than climate porn and fear mongering, and that is as much anathema to the scientific method as the idea of scientific “consensus.”