When the story of the great turn-of-the-millennium climate science fraud comes to be written by future historians, the central role of the RCP8.5 ‘business as usual’ model scenario, much featured in recent IPCC reports, will be obvious to all. This ‘pathway’ has polluted climate model predictions for years with its wild and improbable claims of carbon dioxide emissions and soaring temperatures. A huge number of science papers incorporating the pathway are published by obvious Net Zero activists, and their ‘scientists say’ climate psychosis-inducing fairy tales are sped on their way by blinkered journalists in the mainstream press. The science writer Roger Pielke Jr. notes that RCP8.5 has been “falsified” – most knew it was fake, historians are likely to conclude, but the Net Zero addiction was too strong for it to be given up.

By “falsified”, Dr Pielke explains in a recent Substack article, he means that the pathway’s emissions trajectory is already well out of step with reality. To prove his point he offers up the 2021 evidence contained in Burgess et al. highlighted in the graph below.

According to Pielke, the gap between the black arrow (RCP8.5) and the blue arrow (reality) indicates that RCP8.5 is not just unlikely but impossible. Since the paper was published, Pielke notes that the gap between RCP8.5 and reality has only grown larger. RCP8.5 also assumes that global temperatures will rise by a possible 4°C in less than 80 years, a heck of an ask given temperatures have risen by barely 0.25°C over at least the last 25 years. Recently President Trump’s executive order titled ‘Restoring Gold Standard Science’ effectively outlawed the use of RCP8.5 for scientists on the US federal payroll, noting that it uses highly unlikely assumptions such as end-of-century coal use exceeding estimates of recoverable reserves.

The climate researcher Zeke Hausfather dismissed the Trump Administration’s claims about RCP8.5 by stating that the research community had moved on, noted Pielke. But Hausfather’s ‘nothing to see here’ is wrong, says Pielke. From 2018 to 2021, Google Scholar reported 17,000 articles published using RCP8.5, he reports. From 2022 to 2025, the same source reported 16,900 offending articles. “Some shift,” he observes.