{"id":446000,"date":"2026-05-22T12:22:42","date_gmt":"2026-05-22T19:22:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=446000"},"modified":"2026-05-22T12:22:43","modified_gmt":"2026-05-22T19:22:43","slug":"rcp-8-5-when-the-spherical-cows-escape-the-barn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=446000","title":{"rendered":"RCP 8.5: When the Spherical Cows Escape the Barn"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

From Watts Up With That?<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Charles Rotter<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A scenario the modelers built as a stress test became, for fifteen years, the scenario the press treated as your future. It has now been quietly retired. The reckoning has not yet begun.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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There is an old joke in physics. A dairy farmer hires a theoretical physicist to improve milk production. The physicist disappears for six months, returns with a 200-page report, and announces:\u00a0I have a solution. It works for spherical cows in a vacuum.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The joke endures because every physicist has met the spherical cow. To make a hard problem tractable, you strip the real world down to a geometry the math can handle. A round, frictionless object floating in nothing is something you can actually compute. A real cow is not. The simplifying assumption is a tool. useful inside the laboratory and the seminar room, useless the moment it walks out the door.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

RCP 8.5 was a spherical cow. For fifteen years it walked out the door, into headlines, into government reports, into court filings, into bank stress tests, and into the climate fears of hundreds of millions of people who had no idea what it was. As of April 2026, the international committee that produces the official climate scenarios for the United Nations has quietly walked it back into the barn and shut the door behind it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The retirement, in the form of a footnote<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

On April 7, 2026,\u00a0Geoscientific Model Development<\/em>\u00a0published\u00a0van Vuuren et al. 2026<\/a>, the design paper for the next round of climate model scenarios, the inputs that will feed the IPCC\u2019s Seventh Assessment Report (AR7) and the climate research of the rest of the decade. Buried inside is the verdict that closes the book on a decade and a half of climate communication: in the authors\u2019 own characterization,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

the CMIP6 high emission levels (quantified by SSP5-8.5) have become implausible.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

That is the formal obituary, written by the same scientific community that wrote the birth certificate. The new CMIP7 framework eliminates the three extreme scenarios, RCP 8.5, SSP5-8.5, and SSP3-7.0, that have dominated climate research, climate journalism, and climate policy since the early 2010s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The announcement was met, in the English-language press, with a silence so complete that Roger Pielke Jr., who has been\u00a0documenting the misuse of these scenarios<\/a>\u00a0in the peer-reviewed literature for years, spent the first two weeks of May\u00a0simply cataloging<\/a>\u00a0which mainstream outlets had not yet covered the story. The list was nearly all of them. Coverage finally arrived, more than a month after publication, only when the President of the United States posted about it on social media. The\u00a0New York Times<\/em>, the\u00a0Washington Post<\/em><\/a>, the AP,\u00a0Bloomberg<\/em>, and\u00a0Carbon Brief<\/em>\u00a0then all ran stories within forty-eight hours, most of them framed around the President rather than the science, and most repeating the same factual errors about what RCP 8.5 had ever been.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To understand why that matters, you have to understand what RCP 8.5 actually was, and what it was not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What it was: a high-signal input for a noisy machine<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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From a constructive discussion elsewhere with a leading climate modeler, a comment that helps us to better understand how we got into the scenario mess. I agree 100% with his comment:

“From a modeling side, most of us really do not care much (or do not know about) the\u2026\u2014 The Honest Broker (@RogerPielkeJr)\u00a0May 21, 2026<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The cleanest description of what RCP 8.5 was built for came from an unnamed climate modeler quoted recently by Pielke. Asked why the extreme scenario became so dominant in model intercomparison runs, the modeler explained that most modelers do not pay close attention to the socioeconomic assumptions underlying any given scenario. What they need is an input that drives a climate model. In the modeler\u2019s words:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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a higher signal is better from a signal\/noise perspective.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

At ten to a hundred thousand dollars per model run, a higher-emissions scenario produces a cleaner climate signal you can analyze. Lower scenarios require many more runs to pull the signal out of the natural variability. Choices have to be made.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In other words, RCP 8.5 was useful to physical climate modelers in roughly the same way the spherical cow is useful to a graduate student studying angular momentum. It made the math tractable. It was never meant to be a forecast. It was a stress test, a deliberately extreme number you plug in so you can compare model outputs and study the climate system\u2019s response to a large radiative forcing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The original 2011 paper that introduced RCP 8.5 (Riahi et al. in\u00a0Climatic Change<\/em><\/a>) said as much: a baseline at the upper end of the published literature, assuming a roughly sevenfold expansion of global coal use through 2100, a population trajectory at the high end of UN projections, and effectively no technological progress in low-carbon energy. Even at the time, this was understood to be an outlier. Keywan Riahi, the lead author,\u00a0now tells<\/a>\u00a0Seth Borenstein of the Associated Press:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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it was never a likely case.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Zeke Hausfather,\u00a0on a recent panel<\/a>\u00a0hosted by Andrew Revkin, conceded essentially the same thing, that the 2011 energy modeling literature had been clear about what RCP 8.5 was: a high-end statistical bookend, not, as he put it,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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a particular likely outcome.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

If that is what Riahi and Hausfather believe now, and what the literature said in 2011, it raises a question. Why was Riahi\u2019s scenario quietly promoted from \u201coutlier baseline\u201d to \u201cbusiness as usual\u201d in the IPCC\u2019s Fifth and Sixth Assessment Reports, in the U.S. National Climate Assessment, in central bank stress tests, and in fifteen years of climate journalism?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And why did nobody, at any of those institutions, including the modeling community itself, shout?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The cow escapes<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The transformation from stress test to forecast happened by gradual institutional drift, not by deliberate decision. The IPCC\u2019s Fifth Assessment Report in 2013 designated RCP 8.5 as the reference scenario. Once a generation of impact studies, vulnerability assessments, and policy papers had been written under that assumption, the IPCC\u2019s Sixth Assessment Report in 2021 inherited a body of literature so saturated with RCP 8.5 that disentangling it was no longer possible. The Sixth Assessment included\u00a0mealy-mouthed language<\/a>\u00a0acknowledging the scenario was unlikely while continuing to feature it prominently throughout.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By that point, RCP 8.5 had become the implicit baseline for almost everything readers were being told about the climate future. It was the source of nearly every \u201cby 2100\u201d headline of the past decade. According to\u00a0Pielke\u2019s accounting<\/a>, RCP 8.5 accounted for over half the scenario references in the 2018 U.S. Fourth National Climate Assessment, around sixty percent in the IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere, and roughly a third of all RCP references in the IPCC AR5. By early 2020, peer-reviewed studies invoking it were appearing at a rate of roughly twenty per day. So far in 2026, even after the formal retirement, they are appearing at thirty per day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This was not an obscure technical artifact. It was the engine of the climate-alarm story for a generation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It also became the basis of policy.\u00a0Pielke\u2019s tabulation<\/a>\u00a0runs to dozens of pages. National climate impact assessments in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, Australia, Japan, and the Netherlands all use RCP 8.5 or SSP5-8.5 as a reference scenario. The Network for Greening the Financial System framework, used by more than 140 central banks, built its \u201cHot House World\u201d stress test on it, which then flowed into the bank capital tests run by the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, the U.S. Federal Reserve, and others. The World Bank\u2019s Climate Change Knowledge Portal, which produces the climate inputs for Country Climate and Development Reports in more than 100 nations, defaults to SSP5-8.5 and SSP3-7.0. The pending climate-damages lawsuits against U.S. energy producers, including\u00a0Multnomah County\u2019s $51 billion claim<\/a>, are built on damage projections derived from RCP 8.5 modeling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And during all of this, prominent voices in the climate establishment were not quietly hedging. In a 2021 forum reply\u00a0published in\u00a0Issues in Science and Technology<\/em><\/a>, Chris Field, co-chair of IPCC Working Group 2 for the Fifth Assessment, and Marcia McNutt, then president of the National Academy of Sciences, defended the description of RCP 8.5 as a \u201cbusiness-as-usual\u201d pathway as something that, in their words,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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remains 100% accurate.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

That sentence, by the official position of the scenario community that designs these things, is now false.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Where were the modelers?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The deepest question this retirement raises is not how RCP 8.5 was built. Its construction was always documented in plain sight; anyone willing to read the 2011 Riahi paper could see what it assumed and why. The question is why the people who built it, and the people who used it, sat in silence for fifteen years while it was bastardized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The modelers were not deceived. They knew what they had made. They knew the difference between an exploratory high-forcing case and a forecast. Hausfather himself, in the same panel discussion cited above, acknowledged that the 2011 energy modeling literature was clear about what RCP 8.5 was. The information was never hidden. It was simply ignored, first by the impact community, then by journalists, then by central bankers, then by federal courts. And the people who knew better said nothing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Consider the moments at which speaking up would have mattered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When the IPCC AR5 made RCP 8.5 the reference scenario in 2013, the modeling community had standing to object. They did not. When the U.S. National Climate Assessments of 2014 and 2018 built their headline projections on it, the scenario authors had standing to clarify. They did not. When central banks began constructing stress tests around a \u201cHot House World\u201d calibrated to RCP 8.5, the scientists whose work was being repurposed for bank capital regulation had standing to push back. They did not. When the IPCC AR6 in 2021 again featured RCP 8.5 throughout its assessment, while including buried language warning that it had become unlikely, the lead authors could have insisted on a clearer correction. They did not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Roger Pielke Jr. and Justin Ritchie published their formal diagnosis of scenario misuse\u00a0in\u00a0Energy Research & Social Science<\/em><\/a>\u00a0in 2021, the response from senior figures in the climate establishment was not gratitude for a needed correction. It was, in the case of Field and McNutt, an active defense of the indefensible. Pielke and Ritchie spent the next five years being characterized in mainstream coverage as marginal critics rather than as the people who had been correct all along.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"\"
Distorting the view of our climate future: The misuse and abuse of climate pathways and scenarios – ScienceDirect<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

The few who did speak up, Pielke, Ritchie, Matthew Burgess, Steven Koonin, Richard Tol, and a small handful of others, paid the social and professional costs of speaking up. The much larger group that knew, and stayed quiet, did not pay those costs. They are now, in May 2026, beneficiaries of a course correction they did not lead and a quiet retirement that contains no admission of error.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is not a story about scientific fraud. It is a story about institutional cowardice and the sociology of a discipline whose career incentives, funding pipelines, and journal access were aligned with letting a false framing run unchallenged. The technical scientists who could have stood up at any point during the past decade and said\u00a0this is not what our scenario means<\/em>, and made that clear in the public square, not just in cautious footnotes, did not do so. The professional cost of being branded a \u201cdenier\u201d was apparently too high; the cost to the public of letting the bastardization continue was paid by someone else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pielke writes that\u00a0science is self-correcting<\/a>. On a long enough timeline, that is true. But science self-corrects through the work of individuals willing to take the personal risk of contradicting a consensus, not through the passive accumulation of new data inside a silent profession. The reckoning here is not just that RCP 8.5 was wrong. It is that the modeling community knew, and waited, and is now being credited with a correction that arrived only after the costs of denial had become higher than the costs of admission.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The reckoning that hasn\u2019t started<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What does it mean, in practice, that the foundation has now been declared unsound?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Every reader of this site has spent fifteen years being told, in increasingly dire language, what the climate of 2100 will look like. A great deal of that language was downstream of RCP 8.5. The 2026 retirement does not erase those projections from the journalistic record, but it does change how a thoughtful reader should weigh them on the way back through the archive. The \u201cby 2100, coral reefs collapse\u201d story; the \u201cby 2100, the U.S. economy shrinks ten percent\u201d story; the \u201cby 2100, ice-free Arctic, climate refugees, mass extinctions, civilization-threatening heat\u201d stories, a substantial fraction of these were the spherical cow\u2019s footprints across the cultural landscape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The new CMIP7 framework brings the high end of the scenario set down considerably. Pielke\u2019s\u00a0apples-to-apples comparison<\/a>\u00a0using the FaIR climate emulator finds the new HIGH scenario produces about 0.9\u00b0C less warming than SSP5-8.5 by 2081\u20132100. Compared to the IPCC AR6\u2019s projection of SSP5-8.5, the gap widens to about 1.4\u00b0C. The implausibility of the upper-end legacy scenarios, in his phrase, means<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

the future is not what it used to be.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

But the cleanup is not complete, and on this point the WUWT reader should pay close attention to where Pielke and the official scenario community part company. Three observations matter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

First<\/em>, the new HIGH scenario is itself still implausible by the standards Pielke and his coauthors\u00a0have proposed<\/a>\u00a0in the peer-reviewed literature. It inherits the SSP3 storyline, including a 2100 global population the IIASA\u00a0recently revised upward<\/a>\u00a0to 14.5 billion, a number that exceeds every contemporary demographic projection and is driven primarily by an assumed 35% upward revision in Africa\u2019s 2100 population.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Second<\/em>, the new MEDIUM scenario, which van Vuuren et al. describe as a current-policy trajectory, produces higher cumulative emissions through 2100 than the IEA\u2019s current-policy scenario produces by 2050. On the IEA\u2019s own numbers, today\u2019s policy trajectory delivers roughly 2.5\u00b0C of warming by 2100. The new MEDIUM delivers more. Calling it a \u201ccurrent policy\u201d scenario is, charitably, a stretch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Third<\/em>, the mainstream coverage that finally arrived in May was not a reckoning. The first wave of\u00a0New York Times<\/em>,\u00a0Washington Post<\/em>, AP,\u00a0Bloomberg<\/em>, and\u00a0Carbon Brief<\/em>\u00a0coverage uniformly described RCP 8.5 as the \u201cworst-case\u201d scenario (it was a baseline scenario), attributed its retirement to the success of renewable energy policy (it became implausible because its core assumptions about coal expansion and demographic trends were always wrong), and framed the story around President Trump rather than around fifteen years of institutional error. Pielke\u2019s verdict on the coverage,\u00a0in his most recent post<\/a>: the outlets that built years of stories on RCP 8.5 chose to<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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minimize and deflect.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The lesson<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The lesson here is not that climate scientists were stupid or dishonest. The modelers who pulled RCP 8.5 off the shelf because it gave them a clean signal were doing what physical scientists routinely do.\u00a0It is their subsequent lack of action to correct the record as necessary that screams monumental cowardice.\u00a0<\/strong>The spherical cow has its place. The trouble begins when the spherical cow is wheeled out of the lab and presented to the public as if it were a real cow, and then wheeled into the Federal Reserve and presented to bank regulators as the cow you should be valuing your loan book against, and then wheeled into a federal courthouse and presented to a judge as the cow whose damages an energy company should be required to pay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is what happened. The official scenario community has now admitted, in the formal scientific literature, that the cow was not a cow. They have done so in a footnote, with no apology, after a decade and a half of silence from the broader profession that knew, or could have known, all along. The press that built a generation of front-page stories on it has so far chosen not to notice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The next time you read a headline about climate change and the year 2100, whether it appears in the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>, in a central bank report, or in a complaint filed in federal court, the first question to ask is which scenario the projection rests on. If the answer is RCP 8.5 or SSP5-8.5, you are reading about a spherical cow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The barn door is shut. The cow has gone back inside. What remains is the trail of damage it left while it was out, and an open question about why so many people in a position to stop it kept walking past the open door.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Footnote: At this point it is safe to say the climate models are\u00a0moooot.<\/em>\u00a0[Anthony]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A scenario the modelers built as a stress test became, for fifteen years, the scenario the press treated as your future. It has now been quietly retired. The reckoning has not yet begun.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":121246920,"featured_media":446002,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[691818153,691823446,691821642,691838491,691834208,691824179],"class_list":["post-446000","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-climate-models","tag-climate-scenarios","tag-ipcc-intergovernmental-panel-on-climate-change","tag-rcp-8-5-model","tag-roger-pielke-jr-2","tag-united-nations-un","fallback-thumbnail"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/0-ChatGPT-RCP-85.-When-the-Spherical-Cows-Escape-the-Barn.png?fit=1402%2C1122&ssl=1","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paxLW1-1S1y","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":443421,"url":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=443421","url_meta":{"origin":446000,"position":0},"title":"A Generation of Kids Thinks They Have No Future. 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Vanishing coastlines, catastrophic droughts, mass extinctions, cities underwater \u2014 almost all of it was built on a scenario called RCP 8.5.","rel":"","context":"In \"children\"","block_context":{"text":"children","link":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?tag=children"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/0-A-Generation-of-Kids-Thinks-They-Have-No-Future.-Science-Just-Admitted-Why.jpg?fit=1168%2C784&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/0-A-Generation-of-Kids-Thinks-They-Have-No-Future.-Science-Just-Admitted-Why.jpg?fit=1168%2C784&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/0-A-Generation-of-Kids-Thinks-They-Have-No-Future.-Science-Just-Admitted-Why.jpg?fit=1168%2C784&ssl=1&resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/0-A-Generation-of-Kids-Thinks-They-Have-No-Future.-Science-Just-Admitted-Why.jpg?fit=1168%2C784&ssl=1&resize=700%2C400 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/0-A-Generation-of-Kids-Thinks-They-Have-No-Future.-Science-Just-Admitted-Why.jpg?fit=1168%2C784&ssl=1&resize=1050%2C600 3x"},"classes":[]},{"id":446033,"url":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=446033","url_meta":{"origin":446000,"position":1},"title":"Spot On, New York Post, Billions Have Been Wasted Based on Fake Climate Science","author":"uwe.roland.gross","date":"05\/23\/2026","format":false,"excerpt":"A recent New York Post (NYP) article, titled \u201cBillions have been wasted on UN\u2019s climate change lies,\u201d describes how billions, if not trillions, of dollars have been spent worldwide attempting to slow or stop the world from experiencing the extreme climate change as forecast by the flawed, but widely used\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Climate change\"","block_context":{"text":"Climate change","link":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?tag=climate-change"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/0right-nyp.jpg?fit=1200%2C668&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/0right-nyp.jpg?fit=1200%2C668&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/0right-nyp.jpg?fit=1200%2C668&ssl=1&resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/0right-nyp.jpg?fit=1200%2C668&ssl=1&resize=700%2C400 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/0right-nyp.jpg?fit=1200%2C668&ssl=1&resize=1050%2C600 3x"},"classes":[]},{"id":446688,"url":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=446688","url_meta":{"origin":446000,"position":2},"title":"Heartland Institute Experts React to President Trump\u2019s Social Media Post About UN Retreating from Extremist Climate Models","author":"uwe.roland.gross","date":"05\/27\/2026","format":false,"excerpt":"\u201cThe United Nations TOP Climate Committee just admitted that its own projections (RCP8.5) were WRONG! WRONG! WRONG! For far too long Climate Activism has been used by Dumocrats to scare Americans, push horrible Energy Polices, and fund BILLIONS into their bogus research programs.\u201d","rel":"","context":"In \"agenda-driven modeling\"","block_context":{"text":"agenda-driven modeling","link":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?tag=agenda-driven-modeling"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Trump.jpg?fit=1200%2C600&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Trump.jpg?fit=1200%2C600&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Trump.jpg?fit=1200%2C600&ssl=1&resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Trump.jpg?fit=1200%2C600&ssl=1&resize=700%2C400 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Trump.jpg?fit=1200%2C600&ssl=1&resize=1050%2C600 3x"},"classes":[]},{"id":448192,"url":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=448192","url_meta":{"origin":446000,"position":3},"title":"The Rice Catastrophe Paper and the RCP 8.5 Rug-Pull","author":"uwe.roland.gross","date":"06\/02\/2026","format":false,"excerpt":"A new paper published earlier this year in Communications Earth & Environment reports that the area of land in Asia\u2019s major rice-producing nations exceeding rice\u2019s long-term thermal limits will expand by ten to thirty times by the end of this century. The lead author is Nicolas Gauthier of the Florida\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Climate Catastrophism\"","block_context":{"text":"Climate Catastrophism","link":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?tag=climate-catastrophism"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/0-Copilot_Projected-warming-will-exceed-the-long-term-thermal-limits-of-rice-cultivation.png?fit=1200%2C800&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/0-Copilot_Projected-warming-will-exceed-the-long-term-thermal-limits-of-rice-cultivation.png?fit=1200%2C800&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/0-Copilot_Projected-warming-will-exceed-the-long-term-thermal-limits-of-rice-cultivation.png?fit=1200%2C800&ssl=1&resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/0-Copilot_Projected-warming-will-exceed-the-long-term-thermal-limits-of-rice-cultivation.png?fit=1200%2C800&ssl=1&resize=700%2C400 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/0-Copilot_Projected-warming-will-exceed-the-long-term-thermal-limits-of-rice-cultivation.png?fit=1200%2C800&ssl=1&resize=1050%2C600 3x"},"classes":[]},{"id":444778,"url":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=444778","url_meta":{"origin":446000,"position":4},"title":"IPCC Quietly Buries Its Own Climate Catastrophe Scenarios","author":"uwe.roland.gross","date":"05\/17\/2026","format":false,"excerpt":"This refers to RCP8.5 (from AR5) and its successor SSP5-8.5 (in AR6). These high-end emissions scenarios assumed massive, continued growth in coal use and very high forcing (~8.5 W\/m\u00b2 by 2100), leading to ~3\u20135\u00b0C+ warming by 2100 in many models. Critics (including Vahrenholt) have long called them unrealistic \"business-as-usual\" portrayals\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Article 20a GG (environmental protection)\"","block_context":{"text":"Article 20a GG (environmental protection)","link":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?tag=article-20a-gg-environmental-protection"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/0-IPCC-Quietly-Buries-Its-Own-Climate-Catastrophe-Scenarios.jpg?fit=784%2C1168&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/0-IPCC-Quietly-Buries-Its-Own-Climate-Catastrophe-Scenarios.jpg?fit=784%2C1168&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/0-IPCC-Quietly-Buries-Its-Own-Climate-Catastrophe-Scenarios.jpg?fit=784%2C1168&ssl=1&resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/0-IPCC-Quietly-Buries-Its-Own-Climate-Catastrophe-Scenarios.jpg?fit=784%2C1168&ssl=1&resize=700%2C400 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":446359,"url":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=446359","url_meta":{"origin":446000,"position":5},"title":"Germany\u2019s AfD Party Calls Debunked Climate Scenarios \u201cGreatest Fraud In Human History\u201d","author":"uwe.roland.gross","date":"05\/25\/2026","format":false,"excerpt":"Climate alarmism under attack in Germany\u2026 Germany\u2019s No. 1 party \u2013 conservative AfD Party \u2013 calls for tangible consequences for politics, the media, and the judiciary after extreme emission scenario \u201cRCP 8.5 is no longer scientifically serious and will no longer be used.","rel":"","context":"In \"Climate models\"","block_context":{"text":"Climate models","link":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?tag=climate-models"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/0-ChatGPT-Germanys-AfD-Party-Calls-Debunked-Climate-Scenarios-Greatest-Fraud-In-Human-History.png?fit=1200%2C800&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/0-ChatGPT-Germanys-AfD-Party-Calls-Debunked-Climate-Scenarios-Greatest-Fraud-In-Human-History.png?fit=1200%2C800&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/0-ChatGPT-Germanys-AfD-Party-Calls-Debunked-Climate-Scenarios-Greatest-Fraud-In-Human-History.png?fit=1200%2C800&ssl=1&resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/0-ChatGPT-Germanys-AfD-Party-Calls-Debunked-Climate-Scenarios-Greatest-Fraud-In-Human-History.png?fit=1200%2C800&ssl=1&resize=700%2C400 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/0-ChatGPT-Germanys-AfD-Party-Calls-Debunked-Climate-Scenarios-Greatest-Fraud-In-Human-History.png?fit=1200%2C800&ssl=1&resize=1050%2C600 3x"},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446000","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/121246920"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=446000"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446000\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":446013,"href":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446000\/revisions\/446013"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/446002"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=446000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=446000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=446000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}