A Generation of Kids Thinks They Have No Future. Science Just Admitted Why.
1 day ago Anthony Watts
For nearly two decades, a single climate model scenario haunted virtually every apocalyptic headline you read about our planet’s future. Vanishing coastlines, catastrophic droughts, mass extinctions, cities underwater — almost all of it was built on a scenario called RCP 8.5. And now, in a development that climate scientist Roger Pielke Jr. is calling the “most significant development in climate research in decades,” the international committee responsible for producing the official scenarios that feed into IPCC climate assessments has formally eliminated RCP 8.5 — and its successor SSP5-8.5 — from the new framework, classifying them as implausible.
Let that sink in for a moment. Implausible. That’s a weasel word for Impossible. That’s the word the scientists themselves are now using to describe the scenario that dominated two full IPCC assessment cycles, generated tens of thousands of research papers, and provided the raw material for an estimated hundreds of thousands of media stories that told the public — and their children — that the world as we know it was coming to an end.
It’s a good day for science. It’s a terrible indictment of what was done in science’s name.
What Was RCP 8.5, Anyway?
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2026/05/09/a-generation-of-kids-thinks-they-have-no-future-science-just-admitted-why/
