Brian Bacon

The climate crisis agenda was built upon a predicted global warming scenario, now widely recognised as 'implausible'. The Earth is not facing runaway warming. First introduced in 2011 to guide policy, this extreme high-emissions projection - known as RCP8.5 (and later SSP5-8.5) - predicted a 5.5°C temperature rise by 2100. This misleading scenario was used to create subsequent dramatic news headlines for over a decade. With the retirement of the extreme 5°C baseline ahead of the 7th Assessment Report (AR7), the ceiling for high-emissions projections has dropped significantly. The IPCC’s high-end baselines have been downgraded towards a 3.3°C ceiling - but even this appears to be implausible. The flaws in this runaway warming scenario lies in the record of Earth's long climate history. The world exists within a long-term ice age regime that has spanned 34 million years. Current temperatures are actually 9°C 'colder' than the planet's 24°C average across the past 485 million years (Judd et al., Science 2024). The current average temperature stands at approximately 15°C. This already low ceiling reflects a modest increase of up to 1.4°C over the past 250 years since the start of the Industrial Revolution. It also shows that increases in CO₂ do not automatically trigger runaway temperatures. Earth’s climate system is amazingly complex, and is driven by multiple interacting variables. The principal driver of our current ice age cycle lies in orbital anomalies known as Milankovitch cycles, while global surface temperatures remain a composite of distinct regional dynamics. Far from causing ecological collapse, the atmospheric CO₂ rise of just over 100 ppm has actually driven a substantial expansion of global leaf area across previously sparse terrain. Certain crop yields have surged, a phenomenon confirmed worldwide via NASA satellite vegetation data. At roughly 420 parts per million, CO₂ remains a trace gas - still among the lowest concentrations in geological history. The atmosphere is more than 99.9% nitrogen, oxygen, and argon, while atmospheric water vapor exceeds CO₂ concentrations many times over. A deceptive, anthropogenic CO₂-driven warming narrative had been heavily promoted by the United Nations and it's agencies, the World Meteorological Organization and the IPCC. This served as the foundational justification for Net Zero mandates. In practice, it forced the premature dismantling of reliable hydrocarbon energy infrastructure across most Western nations. The downstream result has been widespread economic decline and a historic transfer of industrial capacity to Beijing. China now produces roughly 90% of the world's wind turbines, solar panels and critical processing components. Many consider this to be the greatest transfer of wealth in world history. However, it also suggests the world faces a vast and unpredictable geopolitical shakeup.