Vox with a BOMBSHELL admission in the wake of the demise of RCP8.5.
“Those numbers shaped a decade and a half of climate journalism, including a lot of my own when I covered climate change at Time magazine. I didn’t always know — and didn’t always communicate — that the… pic.twitter.com/uVUBPTjJpe
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) May 23, 2026
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/489488/climate-change-scenario-rcp-8-5-warming-emissions
by Bryan Walsh
You’ve probably never heard of the term “RCP 8.5” — the highest-emission scenario used by climate scientists to project the planet’s future. But if you’ve read about climate change, you’ve seen the numbers and nightmarish outcomes it produced: 4°C of warming by 2100, sometimes 5°C, sea level rising multiple feet, parts of the planet too hot for humans.
Those numbers shaped a decade and a half of climate journalism, including a lot of my own when I covered climate change at Time magazine. I didn’t always know — and didn’t always communicate — that the scenario behind the most apocalyptic, attention-getting findings was largely an attempt to imagine how bad things could get, not a true forecast. But I wasn’t alone. RCP 8.5 was a frequent background presence in climate journalism.
Last month, though, the scientists who built that scenario formally retired it. In a paper published in Geoscientific Model Development, Detlef van Vuuren and more than 40 co-authors eliminated RCP 8.5 from the scenarios that will feed into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Seventh Assessment Report, which is due in 2029. Based on falling clean-energy costs, climate policy, and recent emissions trends, the highest-emissions pathway had become, in their words, “implausible.”
We’ve been trying to tell everybody for decades this was lousy science. But those paid to push it had a lot more backing than those of us who did it free (and were canceled for it). https://t.co/3UZCOGZfkC
— William M Briggs – Statistician to the Stars! (@FamedCelebrity) May 26, 2026
Thanks, Marc. Here are the receipts for your article.
— Willis Eschenbach (@WEschenbach) May 25, 2026
SSP5-8.5: Garbage In, Doomcasting Out
RCP8.5 ABSOLUTELY was a forecast. It was the "Business As Usual" forecast. The furious myth making going on now designed to cover their asses for their decades of fear-mongering falsehoods is breathtaking. Call them out as the liars they are and always were. https://t.co/oYNUrwEFOH
— Joseph Toomey (@JosephEToomey) May 27, 2026
