Last week, the UN-backed climate modeling community quietly retired RCP 8.5 — the infamous “business as usual” scenario that for more than a decade was sold to the public as the most likely future if we didn’t surrender trillions of dollars and our freedoms to the green agenda. President Donald Trump celebrated on Truth Social, calling out years of exaggerated projections. The legacy media’s response has been the most revealing part of all: a grudging, face-saving admission wrapped in spin.

Smoothing and soothing the narrative remains of paramount importance.

This is not new. Back in November 2018, during Trump’s first term, the Fourth National Climate Assessment dropped just after the midterm elections. Then-White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders didn’t mince words: she said the report’s conclusions were based upon the most extreme model scenario. Trump said, “I don’t believe it.” The media exploded in outrage. How dare the administration question the experts? Partisan fact checkers turned out to be wildly wrong.

Yet here we are in May 2026, and the same modeling establishment has finally admitted what critics have said for years: RCP 8.5 was never a realistic central pathway. It assumed a massive global coal renaissance — coal usage exploding to five- or seven-times today’s levels by 2100 — despite clear economic and technological trends pointing the other direction. The scenario was structurally implausible from the start. Indeed, RCP 8.5 was never plausible.

The New York Times, Washington Post, the Associated Press, and others spent more than a decade treating RCP 8.5 as the default future. Headlines warned of drowned cities, mass extinctions, and civilizational collapse by 2100 unless we acted immediately. In the Biden administration, RCP 8.5 and its updated cousin, SSP5-8.5, fueled draconian and ruinous energy and economic policies under the guise of an existential climate threat. Politicians and activists cited them constantly. The Fourth National Climate Assessment relied heavily on it. So did thousands of impact studies that shaped policy from sea walls to insurance rates to trillions in green spending.

None of this was hidden. In 2014, Matt Ridley wrote in the Financial Post that “the one thing we can say about RCP 8.5 is that it is very, very implausible.” In 2017, energy modelers Justin Ritchie and Hadi Dowlatabadi published a detailed takedown of the coal assumptions. In 2018, my late colleague Pat Michaels and I at the Cato Institute laid out the same problems with these moribund models. The loudest and most steadfast voice, however, belonged to Roger Pielke Jr., who led the charge with detailed work exposing the exaggeration and lack of course correction — and was treated very unfairly for it.

Pielke bore the brunt of the response from much of the climate establishment and legacy media: smears, silence, or claims that we were “downplaying the risks.”

They weren’t just wrong. They were protecting a narrative underpinning global climate action.

Even after Zeke Hausfather and Glen Peters published their important 2020 Nature comment pointing out the rampant misuse, many in the climate impacts community kept defaulting to RCP 8.5. Why? It produced scary results that justified bigger research budgets, more urgent headlines, and more aggressive policies. Only sustained external pressure — including Trump’s Gold Standard Science Executive Order — finally forced the modeling community to retire the high-end scenarios as “implausible” for CMIP7.

Now watch the spin. The New York Times and others insist the worst-case scenario “had become” implausible because of policy success and cheap renewables. It’s a clever half-truth. Yes, clean energy has done well. But the core problem was never recent success. It was unrealistic assumptions baked into the scenario from the beginning. The media will not say the quiet part out loud: they spent more than a decade hyping an extreme outlier as the most likely future, and critics who pointed that out were attacked as deniers. And the media was a major part of the smear machine.

This matters. Trillions of dollars in policy, regulation, and subsidies were justified in part by these hyperbolic projections. Public fear was stoked. Trust in institutions was eroded. Let’s connect the dots: early warnings were ignored, critics smeared, and a reluctant correction came only after presidential political pressure. This misinformation campaign, aided and abetted by the media, erodes public trust in science.

President Trump has been consistent: the climate alarmism pushed by some activists and their media allies contains large elements of exaggeration and a political agenda. The quiet retirement of RCP 8.5 proves he was right all along about these hyperbolic models. The media only reported on the story days after Trump and the White House broke the news on social media. But the New York Times couldn’t report the major news without wrapping it in face-saving language that still protects the broader narrative.

Science best advances when it corrects its errors openly. The RCP 8.5 saga shows how slowly and grudgingly that correction happens when politics and funding are involved. Americans deserve better than this narrative management disguised as science. They deserve a full accounting and audit of the damage done by hyperbolic climate model scenarios.

***

Dr. Ryan Maue is a former NOAA chief scientist in the Trump administration and a former White House Office of Science and Technology Policy official. He is on X @RyanWeather and Substack at “Weather Trader.”

Menu

Trump Was Right About Hyperbolic Climate Models