2026-05-18 15:10 UTC
When RCP8.5 was published in 2011, global emissions had just grown 30% in a decade, clean energy was expensive, and EVs barely existed. Even then, RCP8.5 was chosen to represent the ~90th percentile of baseline scenarios. It was always the high end, not the central case.
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@hausfath@fediscience.org 2026-05-18 15:10
But due to a breakdown in communication between energy modelers and climate scientists, RCP8.5 got widely (mis)labeled as "business as usual." That framing stuck, and led to inaccurate portrayals of likely futures in a lot of impact research over the past 15 years. 4/11