Authored by Chris Morrison via The Daily Sceptic,
It will be remembered as the greatest mass delusion in the history of the world – that CO2, the life of plants, was considered for a time to be a deadly poison. -Harvard Emeritus Professor Richard Lindzen
When the story of the great turn-of-the-millennium climate science fraud comes to be written by future historians, the central role of the RCP8.5 ‘business as usual’ model scenario as adopted by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will be obvious to all. This ‘pathway’ has polluted climate model predictions for years with its wild and improbable claims of carbon dioxide emissions and soaring temperatures. A huge number of science papers incorporating the pathway are published by obvious Net Zero activists, and their ‘scientists say’ climate psychosis-inducing fairy tales are sped on their way by blinkered journalists in the mainstream press. The science writer Roger Pielke Jr. notes that RCP8.5 has been “falsified” – most knew it was fake, historians are likely to conclude, but the Net Zero addiction was too strong for it to be given up.
By “falsified”, Dr Pielke explains in a recent Substack article, he means that the pathway’s emissions trajectory is already well out of step with reality. To prove his point he offers up the 2021 evidence contained in Burgess et al. highlighted in the graph below.
According to Pielke, the gap between the black arrow (RCP8.5) and the blue arrow (reality) indicates that RCP8.5 is not just unlikely but impossible. Since the paper was published, Pielke notes that the gap between RCP8.5 and reality has only grown larger. RCP8.5 also assumes that global temperatures will rise by a possible 4°C in less than 80 years, a heck of an ask given temperatures have risen by barely 0.25°C over at least the last 25 years. Recently President Trump’s executive order titled ‘Restoring Gold Standard Science’ effectively outlawed the use of RCP8.5 for scientists on the US federal payroll, noting that it uses highly unlikely assumptions such as end-of-century coal use exceeding estimates of recoverable reserves.
The climate researcher Zeke Hausfather dismissed the Trump Administration’s claims about RCP8.5 by stating that the research community had moved on, noted Pielke. But Hausfather’s ‘nothing to see here’ is wrong, says Pielke. From 2018 to 2021, Google Scholar reported 17,000 articles published using RCP8.5, he reports. From 2022 to 2025, the same source reported 16,900 offending articles. “Some shift,” he observes.
Of course, as Pielke shows, the use of RCP8.5 and its later similar counterpart SSP5-8.5 is far from over, and in fact it appears to be increasingly vital in whipping up support for the fading Net Zero fantasy. Nowhere more so than in mainstream media where a truly awful example of its use was to be found in a recent story written by Mark Poynting at the BBC. This rising doomster star recently sent the children to bed crying by effectively claiming that ‘scientists say’ coastal land and beyond could be overwhelmed with several metres of sea level rise if the global temperature moves by three-tenths of a degree centigrade. This magnificent effort from yet another climate activist on the BBC payroll was arrived at by pushing the boundaries well beyond what even SSP5-8.5 predicted. Based on a paper looking at polar ice melt, which gave a high-emissions projected rise by 2100 of between 12 and 52 centimetres, Poynting chanced on a suggestion in the paper that the IPCC said it could not rule out (admittedly with “low confidence”) that the pathway could point to a sea level rise of over 15 metres by 2300. That’s the way you do it, job done with the first paragraph going strong on the several metres claim “even if the ambitious targets of limiting global warming to 1.5°C is met”.
In 2021 Roger Pielke teamed up with Justin Ritchie and argued that the use of RCP8.5 was driven by the requirements that computer climate models had a high signal-to-noise ratio. In other words, although the pair do not put it in precisely these terms, rigged models driving political propaganda needed to over-emphasise any greenhouse gas warming from burning hydrocarbons compared with natural climate variation. The lack of real world plausibility is said to have led to misleading policy implications.
And some! The history of the great climate science scam and the role it played in the collectivists trying to foist Net Zero on a global population will give RCP8.5 a starring role. But it will also accuse those who trashed the scientific process, invented the idea of ‘settled’ science and attempted to demonise any findings that didn’t blame humans for the weather – looking at you BBC, but you were little worse than most mainstream media (it’s just that we had to pay for all your twaddle). Blame can also be attached to state-funded meteorological operations around the world using unnaturally heat-ravaged stations to produce rising temperature readings and countless new ‘records’. Nobody in the polite mainstream brought up all the dud data since to do so would have opened a Pandora’s box that was in nobody’s political interest. It will not, of course, be possible to forget all those university employees adding ‘science’ to describe their unscientific work and greatly helping their employment prospects, not to mention their grant-raising abilities. And there will be a big shout out for all those billionaires that poured billions into curating a narrative aimed at everyone from tame journalists to defenceless school children.
But if your correspondent is still around to write the book, I shall reserve a special place in hell for a group of Lib Dem, Labour and Conservative legislators. These 200 dangerous Lefty MPs supported a private member’s bill in the British House of Commons earlier this year that, if it had passed, would have cut the use of all domestic and imported hydrocarbons to barely 10% within a decade. Not enough to even run emergency services, let alone provide warmth and food for a population of nearly 70 million. This is an extreme case, although many politicians seem to wish for measures that will likely lead to economic and societal collapse. Nevertheless, it is a shining example of how far the madness actually went in the first quarter of the 21st century.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.