Ding Dong, RCP8.5 Is Dead!
May 8, 2026
By Paul Homewood
For years, we have been fed a never-ending diet of apocalyptic climate scares – killer heatwaves, biblical floods, deadly droughts, devastating hurricanes, to name just a few.
And it is not just sensationalism from the media that I am talking about. The language may have been slightly less dramatic, but official bodies from the UN down have been equally guilty, including our own Met Office.
All these scare stories have one thing in common – they are based on emissions scenarios, which have long been regarded by independent experts as implausibly high. The scenario in question is known as RCP8.5.
RCPs are a set of greenhouse gas concentration trajectories (not emissions scenarios per se) used by the IPCC for climate modelling and projections. They describe different possible future paths for atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations and the resulting radiative forcing (the change in energy balance in the Earth’s atmosphere, measured in W/m²) by the year 2100.
RCP 8.5 is the highest, being based on continued, strong growth of GHG emissions:
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