The end of the climate change scare

News just in which should stop people worrying so much about climate change. Of course, it's not going to but it should. That news being that the worst estimates of emissions and thus temperature changes just are never going to take place:

The way we get electricity is about to change dramatically, as the era of ever-expanding demand for fossil fuels comes to an end—in less than a decade. That's according to a new forecast by Bloomberg New Energy Finance that plots out global power markets for the next 25 years. 

Call it peak fossil fuels, a turnabout that's happening not because we're running out of coal and gas, but because we're finding cheaper alternatives. Demand is peaking ahead of schedule because electric cars and affordable battery storage for renewable power are arriving faster than expected, as are changes in China's energy mix. 

The most hair raising of estimates of future temperature rises come from a model of the future called RCP 8.5. No, don't worry about the details but this model assumes an ever rising use of fossil fuels off into the future. Not just that, it assumes that we use ever more coal, not just in total, but as a proportion of fossil fuel use.

The is also what almost everyone wrongly describes as "business as usual" or BAU. The truth is that all of the models created are BAUs. Even the ones which show that climate change will be trivial are BAUs. Simply because that's how the model making m process was done: what could possibly happen in the future without direct action to change behaviour? What possible interactions of population, technology and fuel use could lead to what emissions?

In the earlier set of models there was even one called A1T which just assumed proper business as usual. Population changes as we've been seeing them, technological advance as we've seen it and economic growth as we've seen it: climate change was not a major problem. So too with B1 from that same set of models.

The one that had all panicking was A1FI. And that's roughly the same as RCP 8.5 in this newer set of models. And if what Bloomberg is reporting there is true then neither of those models will ever come true.

Assume that the entire problem over climate change has been properly identified for a moment. No, leave aside the idea that it's all lies. By the very things that the research tells us will cause problems in the future we've already largely done the things needed to avert that danger. Anything beyond a mild warming is predicated upon the idea of ever more fossil fuel use. If that's not true because of what we've already done then anything beyond a mild warming is not true either.