A decade later, predictions haven’t happened, and now are considered ‘implausible’
By Benjamin Roberts, Daily Caller News Foundation
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.