Climate scientists discarded an extreme global warming model frequently cited by news outlets in April after its predictions failed to materialize for over a decade.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found that Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5 and similar proposed temperature trajectories “have become implausible,” a change they attribute to environmental policies. Numerous media outlets used RCP 8.5 to justify sensationalist headlines about Earth’s climate.
Though RCP 8.5 was intended as a worst case scenario by its modelers, publications like The Guardian cited it as the “business-as-usual path of high fossil fuel consumption and carbon pollution” to run headlines like “Global warming could be more devastating to the economy than we thought.”
“The Guardian, which ran many dozens (hundreds?) of stories premised on RCP 8.5 projections over fifteen years, has run nothing [on RCP 8.5’s withdrawal],” American Enterprise Institute (AEI) Senior Fellow Roger Pielke Jr noted in a May 9 report.
Other headlines from The Guardian relying on RCP 8.5 include “NASA climate study warns of unprecedented North American drought,” and “Inside Australia’s climate emergency: the killer heat.”
The New York Times declared “The Great Climate Migration Has Begun” in 2020, reporting future crop failures and a hotter South America would drive 30 million migrants to the United States.
“The New York Times has been perhaps the most prominent English-language home for promoting news stories based on studies that rely on RCP8.5. They’ve said nothing about its retirement,” Pielke wrote for AEI.
These predictions were also based on RCP 8.5’s estimated 4.8 degrees Celsius global temperature increase by 2100. The new projection is a three-degree increase, according to the IPCC.
CMIP7 is the overarching climate modeling program phasing out RCP 8.5.
“The practical reason is that it is time for new scenarios on the CMIP and IPCC schedule for the IPCC 7th assessment report,” Pielke said when asked about the rescission’s timing. “The substantive reason is that the gap between the extreme scenarios and reality has become too large to deny.”
RCP 8.5 relied on multiple assumptions that are no longer feasible, according to Pielke and the IPCC.
“RCP8.5 assumed the world was moving towards coal at breakneck speed and every other energy source was going down,” Pielke said. “None of that has any relevance for the real world, where coal is declining and solar is booming.”
Though many headlines were premised on RCP 8.5’s now defunct estimates, few publications have noted the IPCC’s reversal or publicly commented on years of potentially inaccurate reporting.
“Some of us have been talking about this for almost a decade. The fact that it took so long is a big problem. There will be significant consequences as the world unwinds from the extreme scenarios,” Pielke said in response to previous media reliance on RCP 8.5. “Science is self-correcting but sometimes that process takes too long.”
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