The Apocalypse Machine Rolls On
Get ready for a new extreme climate scenario
Roger Pielke Jr.
Apr 09, 2025
Climate scenarios are fundamental to climate research and policy. For more than a decade, one scenario dominated research informing discussions of climate among scientists and decision makers. Called RCP8.5, today that scenario is widely recognized as implausible, leading to apocalyptic portrayals of future climate change and providing an unreliable basis for policy analyses for adaptation and mitigation.1
Remarkably, the climate science community appears to be on the brink of repeating the folly of RCP8.5, with a new extreme scenario that will be used in “thousands of research papers” and serve as the “foundation of major parts of IPCC assessments.”2 As was the case with RCP8.5, the new family of climate scenarios will be released with absolutely no formal evaluation of their plausibility or feasibility.
This is simply scientific malpractice for a field justified by its relevance to policy.
The family of six proposed new scenarios has been developed by a small group of mainly U.S. and European scientists in a group called the Scenario-Model Intercomparison Project (Scenario-MIP). The Scenario-MIP is part of a larger international project focused on Earth system modeling.
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/the-apocalypse-machine-rolls-on?r=4i9cy&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true
