UN panel retires ‘bad news’ but unrealistic RCP8.5 scenario that media took as IPCC gospel to create unnecessary climate fears
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., Wall Street Journal, May 30, 2026
Many Americans still think the key question in climate politics is a human effect on climate, yea or nay, believer vs. denier.
No. For 40 years, the only interesting questions have been how and how much are we influencing the climate, and the cost and benefit of proposed actions—questions that can’t be answered by shouting yea or nay about a human role in climate change.
Activists have taught us one thing. Hectoring about the end of the world, insisting the science is “settled,” equating doubters to Holocaust deniers, has been a stimulant to green pork and not real climate policy, the pinnacle of cynicism being Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.
The public, understandably, long ago stopped listening. Or maybe it started getting its guidance from Donald Trump, which wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.
This month, when an authoritative United Nations advisory panel quietly junked a long-misused worst-case emissions scenario known as RCP 8.5, one of the first to notice was the president, who charmingly tweeted about “Dumocrats” and their “WRONG, WRONG, WRONG” climate estimates.
This was a public service, it turned out, for Mr. Trump’s post forced the media to reckon with a decade’s worth of its own bad reporting.
Let’s start with a bit of perspective. It all begins with a 2018 U.S. government assessment, instigating what I called a psychiatric moment for the news media. Piling up worst-case assumptions, including RCP 8.5, the report showed warming nevertheless to be an affordable burden for Americans, who would be three or four times as rich by 2090 despite an adverse climate.
But this created a problem for the press. All climate news must be bad tending toward worse. Reporters did the only thing they could. They ignored the numbers and filled their dispatches with adjectives indicating a doom that, hilariously, the study didn’t support.
All climate news must be bad tending toward worse. Reporters did the only thing they could. They ignored the numbers and filled their dispatches with adjectives indicating a doom that, hilariously, the study didn’t support.
Par for the course, maybe, but the episode was so grossly stupid, it gave birth to a resolution by scientists to stop feeding the media worst-case scenarios to misrepresent. This impulse has now been honored with a semicongratulatory presidential tweet.
Always a laggard, though, is the New York Times. First, it resorted to a canard in response to Mr. Trump’s posting, a story claiming that RCP 8.5, far from being faulty, simply was rendered moot by the glorious carbon-reducing progress of green energy.
This was so obviously false that the paper ran out a second story, now admitting that “news stories [i.e., its own] about climate research often emphasized results based on RCP 8.5 as a picture of what the world can expect unless countries slash their emissions, which isn’t right.”
RCP8.5 was never intended to be realistic
Understand: RCP 8.5 was created to give scientists a high-emissions path to play with. From the start, it lacked any “consistent internal logic,” as its original designers stipulated.
Only later was a back story of justification added. In a RCP 8.5 world, all technological progress in the energy field would end. That is, with a strange exception: The technology to allow the world to quintuple its coal consumption, such as burning coal in cars.
In any sane model, of course, technological advance is routine and must be accounted for. And we’ve had plenty in all areas of energy production and distribution, including green energy. But the world consumes more of every kind of energy, even renewables, without necessarily having any deliberate effect on emissions, though those emissions remain far below the RCP 8.5 forecast, which proved useful only for overselling climate doom to the public.
The larger lesson is an extraordinary story of futility and cynicism, which passes itself off as climate politics. Literally trillions of dollars have been wasted. The story begins with the Obama administration ditching a carbon tax in favor of green pork. It ends with a former John Kerry aide arguing last year that because the effects of climate change “resemble those if China or Indonesia were to launch missiles at the United States,” the U.S. should consider employing military power against emitting countries.
This record of disgrace only underlines the glory (and mystery) of the current moment. Organized climate science is finally repenting of its overuse of worst-case scenarios, and not because of searching criticism from an honest and competent news media, but because of embarrassment at shoddy mainstream coverage of climate science.
More amazing, the truth has now reached readers of the New York Times and likely wouldn’t have if Mr. Trump hadn’t posted about climate science, in his usual hyperbolic, all-caps way, on Truth Social.