The Climate Scenario That Changed the World
For more than a decade, one climate scenario exercised extraordinary influence over public policy, media reporting, corporate planning, and public consciousness.
Most people never heard of it. It was known simply as RCP 8.5.
Yet behind countless headlines predicting climate catastrophe, behind many of the studies cited by activists and politicians, and behind much of the urgency driving climate policy stood this single scenario...
Although originally intended as a high-end scenario, it gradually became treated throughout much of the scientific literature, media reporting, and policy discussion as a plausible “business as usual” future. Thousands of studies employed it. Governments used projections derived from it. Journalists routinely cited forecasts based upon it. Yet in recent years a growing number of researchers involved in climate scenario development have argued that its assumptions do not represent a realistic pathway for the world economy...
... its role as a plausible baseline future is being quietly retired and pushed aside with remarkably little public discussion...
For years the public was told the world was heading toward catastrophe. Trillions of dollars of spending, regulations, taxes, subsidies, net-zero policies, ESG mandates, school curricula, media campaigns, and legal judgments were justified using projections heavily reliant on a scenario that many climate scientists now acknowledge was implausible...
RCP 8.5 was never merely an obscure scientific exercise. It became the engine room of modern climate alarmism...
Although originally developed as an extreme emissions pathway, it gradually came to be treated as something very different: the future we were supposedly heading toward if governments failed to act...
The problem arises when institutions spend years promoting a particular narrative and then show little interest in examining whether the assumptions behind that narrative were sound...
This question extends far beyond climate. A new technocratic culture is emerging in which models often enjoy greater authority than direct observation...
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