For over a decade, a single extreme climate scenario – the IPCC’s RCP8.5 – powered nearly every alarming headline, regulation, lawsuit and school curriculum on climate change.
Scientists flagged it as unrealistic as early as 2017. The institutions that kept using it knew. This is the record.
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RCP 8.5 (Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5) is a high-emissions climate scenario used to model future greenhouse gas concentrations. It was used by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (“IPCC”) to represent a plausible “business as usual” outcome. In this scenario, global mean temperatures were projected to rise by approximately 4.3°C to 5°C by 2100, with CO2-equivalent emissions potentially tripling by the end of the century.
Related:
- UKCP18 Guidance: Representative Concentration Pathways, Met Office, 2018
- Ding Dong, RCP8.5 Is Dead!, Watts Up With That, 9 May 2026
RCP 8.5 was problematic from the start. Finally, after years of scientists saying as much, a study was published in April 2026 that declared RCP8.5 was implausible. This study is significant because it was written by “scientists” who are developing the greenhouse gas scenarios for the IPCC’s upcoming Seventh Assessment Report (“AR7”). The developers have eliminated RCP8.5, and its successor SSP5-8.5, from their future climate scenarios that will underpin AR7.
Related:
- IPCC admits its doomsday model is “implausible” – corporate media is silent
- IPCC will drop its implausible doomsday scenario but will continue its “alarmism-as-usual” climate change narrative
The American Energy Institute has a website, ‘They Knew’, dedicated to exposing the RCP8.5 scam. The following is the summary shown on the website’s landing page. It is US-focused, but people around the world will recognise that they are witnessing the same in their countries.
They Knew It Was Wrong. They Used It Anyway.
By They Knew
Climate scientists use scenarios to model possible futures – “what-if” stories fed into supercomputers. In 2011, the UN IPCC adopted four such scenarios. RCP8.5 was the extreme high end: roughly 4–5°C of warming, built on assumptions its own creators knew were extraordinary.
• What It Assumed: A world of 12 billion people burning five times more coal than today, with almost no technological progress – exceeding what geologists believe is even physically available to mine.
• How it was labelled: Despite being designed as an unlikely upper bound (~90th percentile of worst-case outcomes), it was widely called “business as usual” – implying it was the expected future if nothing changed.
• What it replaced: In 2026, the scenario committee confirmed the realistic mid-range trajectory implies about 2.5°C of warming – serious, but a world apart from the 5°C apocalypse that dominated headlines for 15 years.
• Why it was chosen: Not because it was realistic, but because the huge gap between extremely high and low scenarios made it easier for computers to detect climate signals amid statistical noise. It was chosen for modelers’ convenience.
They Were Warned – Year by Year
This is not a story about a scientific error that went undetected. By 2020, the problems with RCP8.5 had been published in the world’s most prestigious journals. Every institution that kept using it after these dates made a choice.
2011: RCP8.5 Adopted by the IPCC
The IPCC finalises four climate scenarios. RCP8.5 – designed as an extreme outlier – is labelled the only “baseline,” giving researchers no other no-policy reference point. The feedback loop begins.
2017: First Major Warning: Coal Assumptions Are Physically Impossible
Researchers publish in the journal Energy demonstrating that RCP8.5 requires coal consumption levels that exceed what geologists believe can even be mined. The scenario’s foundations are broken.
2020: “Becomes increasingly implausible with every passing year”
Hausfather and Peters publish a landmark paper in Nature demanding RCP8.5 stop being called “business as usual.” The paper is cited over 1,300 times. By this point, approximately 16,800 scientific papers have been built on RCP8.5.
2021: “One of the most significant failures of scientific integrity”
Pielke and Ritchie call the continued use of RCP8.5 one of the worst failures of scientific integrity of the century. The IPCC’s own report, released the same year, cites RCP8.5 more than 1,359 times.
2022: Biden EPA Quietly Drops It
The Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) removes SSP5–8.5 from its regulatory cost calculations, concluding it falls outside the entire 1st-to-99th-percentile range of plausible futures – essentially calling it impossible. Major English-language media say nothing.
2023: US National Climate Assessment Uses It Anyway
Despite the EPA’s own conclusion, the NCA5 – the federal government’s flagship climate report – is published using SSP5–8.5 as a primary scenario. Over 140 central banks are stress-testing financial systems against it.
2025: Peer-Reviewed Confirmation: Current Policies Track Below 3°C
A comprehensive study confirms warming under current policies tracks well below RCP8.5 territory, and that extreme pathways like 8.5 are “precluded absent an active reversal” of current global trends.
2026: Official Retirement: SSP5–8.5 Declared “Implausible”
The scenario committee officially removes SSP5–8.5 from the framework underpinning the IPCC’s Seventh Assessment Report. De Volkskrant runs it on the front page. Major English-language outlets – the New York Times, BBC, Guardian – say nothing.
Studies Are Still Using It – After Retirement
SSP5–8.5 was officially declared implausible in April 2026. New studies citing it without disclosure are still appearing at roughly 25 per day. We’re logging every one. View the continued misuse tracker HERE.
Who Used It – After They Knew
The following institutions continued building policy, regulations, financial stress tests and legal arguments on RCP8.5 after the 2020 Nature warning. This section will be expanded with detailed entries for each.
• IPCC: Cited RCP8.5 over 1,359 times in its 2021 assessment – the same year its own researchers called continued use a failure of scientific integrity.
• US Government: Used RCP8.5/SSP5–8.5 in the 2018 and 2023 National Climate Assessments, even as the EPA internally concluded it was outside the range of plausible futures.
• 140+ Central Banks: Through the Network for Greening the Financial System, adopted a “Hot House World” stress test calibrated to the extreme pathway. The European Central Bank (“ECB”) tested 112 banks against it.
• World Bank: Applied SSP5–8.5 to Country Climate and Development Reports covering over 100 nations, shaping development policy worldwide.
• Courts and Litigation: Plaintiffs used 8.5-based projections to seek tens of billions in damages. The Climate Judiciary Project trained over 2,000 judges on materials built around it.
• K–12 Education: Six US states mandate climate curricula treating RCP8.5-derived projections as established fact. The California Federation of Teachers began climate education in kindergarten.
• Al Gore: Gore’s Climate Reality Project trained over 4.5 million activists worldwide using presentations built on extreme-scenario projections. His 2006 film ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ – presented to audiences over 1,000 times by his own estimate – depicted worst-case outcomes that scientists later acknowledged used the most pessimistic available models. After RCP8.5’s retirement in 2026, Gore co-authored an op-ed arguing the scenario’s removal had merely “bought us 50 years,” declining to acknowledge that millions were alarmed by projections now officially deemed implausible.
• BlackRock: BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager and a principal architect of the modern environmental, social and governance (“ESG”) movement, disclosed in its 2025 ‘Climate Report’ that it relied on RCP8.5 as its primary “no climate action” scenario for stress-testing investment portfolios – even as the EPA had concluded four years earlier that the scenario fell outside the entire range of plausible futures. BlackRock used those projections to justify climate risk ratings that shaped investment decisions across trillions of dollars in assets globally.
• Michael Mann: After the scenario’s official retirement in May 2026, Mann co-authored an op-ed arguing that RCP8.5’s removal had only “bought us 50 years” – framing the news not as a correction to fifteen years of alarming projections but as a reason to maintain urgency. Mann had spent years as one of the most prominent public voices amplifying worst-case climate outcomes and declined to acknowledge that the scenario underpinning many of those claims had been built on assumptions scientists privately knew were implausible.
What It Did to People
The policy damage is vast. But the most durable cost may be a generation of children taught that the world was ending – based on a scenario scientists privately knew was fiction.
• 59% of young people report being “very or extremely worried” about climate change (Lancet, 10,000 respondents).
• 1 in 4 young Americans aged 16–24 question whether to have children because of climate fears – and nearly 1 in 3 say “maybe” (PNAS, 2025).
• 17,000+ academic papers used RCP8.5 from 2022–2025 alone – after its flaws were publicly known.
• 140+ central banks stress-tested their financial systems against a scenario now officially called implausible.
Primary Sources
All claims on this site are drawn from peer-reviewed research, government documents and mainstream corporate journalism. Key sources are listed below:
- Hausfather & Peters, “Emissions — the ‘business as usual’ story is misleading,” Nature 577, 618 (Jan. 29, 2020)
- Pielke & Ritchie, “How Climate Scenarios Lost Touch With Reality,” Issues in Science and Technology (Summer 2021)
- Ritchie & Dowlatabadi, “Why do climate change scenarios return to coal?,” 140 Energy 1276–91 (2017)
- EPA, External Review Draft of Report on the Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases (Sept. 2022)
- Van Vuuren, D.P., et al., “The Scenario Model Intercomparison Project (ScenarioMIP) for CMIP7” (2026)
- Hickman, C., et al., “Climate anxiety in children and young people,” The Lancet Planetary Health (2021)
- Mosley et al., “Climate Change Fear Among Youth in the United States,” PNAS (2025)
- Hausfather, “An assessment of current policy scenarios over the 21st century,” Dialogues on Climate Change 2(1) (2025)
- Roger Pielke Jr., “RCP8.5 is Officially Dead,” The Honest Broker (Apr. 29, 2026)
- Roger Pielke Jr., “Media Coverage (or not) of RCP8.5 RIP,” The Honest Broker (May 9, 2026)
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