IPCC Retires Its Most Implausible Global Warming Scenarios
“New and improved” climate models are offered, but the ‘plausibility vacuum’ remains. Furthermore, IPCC fails to acknowledge the damage to society and science done by its previous assessments.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, is a United Nations body created in 1988 to periodically review and summarize what the scientific community knows about climate change, its causes, and potential responses.
It does not run its own experiments; instead, it assesses thousands of published studies and produces large assessment reports that then feed into international negotiations and national policies.
Those big assessment reports are organized into working groups, each focusing on different parts of the problem. One group looks at the physical climate system (temperatures, sea level, ice, etc.), another examines impacts and vulnerabilities, and a third evaluates mitigation options such as emissions reductions and technologies.
For years, those assessments pushed “Shared Socioeconomic Pathways” (SSPs) and “Representative Concentration Pathways” (RCPs) scenarios that were portents of dire futures. The elite media would then take those doomsday scenarios and publish climate hysteria, which in turn led to United Nations demands for NGO monies to be spent on control, studies, and more bureaucrats.
Back in the fall of 2025, President Donald Trump asserted that the “climate crisis hoax was over“. A good portion of that hoax was built on those IPCC assessments.
Now the IPCC is effectively retiring the most extreme, coal-heavy pathways and is replacing them with a more moderate set of scenarios better aligned with climate realities and genuine fuel-consumption considerations.
This year alone, 2,600 research papers have been published examining the supposed consequences of a climate future that even the IPCC now admits is totally unrealistic. So let me say what some of us have been pointing out for years: the climate does change it always has, but… pic.twitter.com/Mv2wcuzHWj
— James 🌸🏴🇦🇺 (@comical_engr) May 18, 2026
Climate expert Roger Pielke Jr. shares his thoughts on this change:
For well over a decade, a large portion of climate research and the use of that research has had a real-world version of this problem. The scenarios driving climate projections — the foundational assumptions about our collective future — described a world so removed from plausible reality that the projections built on them tell us more about a hypothetical future than about the one we are actually navigating.
The news that the most extreme climate scenarios have now been officially put out to pasture has now begun to spread far and wide. The scenarios — specifically, RCP8.5, SSP5-8.5, and SSP3-7.0. — were quietly retired last month by the international committee responsible for developing a new basket of official scenarios.
It cannot be overstated how significant this change is — the now-obsolete extreme scenarios underpin the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), tens of thousands of research papers, government policy and regulation around the world, financial standards for the world’s banks, along with much of the media coverage of climate change, from which most people learn about climate science and policy.
Longtime readers of THB, and the outlets where I published before, will know that my colleagues and I have called for the retirement of the extreme scenarios for almost a decade. Now it has happened and the fallout inevitably will be significant.
Trump took a victory lap in the wake of this development.
“GOOD RIDDANCE! After 15 years of Dumocrats promising that ‘Climate Change’ is going to destroy the Planet, the United Nations TOP Climate Committee just admitted that its own projections (RCP8.5) were WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!” Trump chided on Truth Social.
The IPCC framework in question was used to forecast a dramatic rise in sea levels, global crop failures, rapid melting of glaciers, and more, which made some hardcore climate change activists fret about future extinction.
But ultimately, scientists cited data and argued that the push towards renewable energies made that scenario less likely.
“GOOD RIDDANCE! After 15 years of Dumocrats promising that “Climate Change” is going to destroy the Planet, the United Nations TOP Climate Committee just admitted that its own projections (RCP8.5) were WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!” – President DONALD J. TRUMP 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/qd9EulmjKh
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) May 16, 2026
Even with the modifications, Pielke does a deep analysis of the new models and concludes that the “plausibility vacuum remains“:
The deeper problem with the SSP/RCP architecture, as Justin Ritchie has documented at length, is that physical climate modeling became decoupled from the underlying IAM socio-economic scenarios.
Under the RCPs, scenario creators identified concentration pathways and the underlying socio-economic assumptions were expected to be filled in later. Whether the underlying assumptions actually described a coherent picture of the world was never systematically assessed.
Ritchie called this a plausibility vacuum — a situation where any combination of climate model inputs could be used without any assessment of the real-world plausibility of the assumptions.
To be fair, the new CMIP7 framework does address some earlier shortfalls. The new design specifies emission-driven runs as the default, which allows for carbon-cycle feedbacks. The harmonization of emissions to observed 2023 data is an improvement — CMIP6 harmonized to 2014, and that harmonization had become well out-of-date by the time AR6 came out.
However, the plausibility vacuum problem remains.
THE IPCC DUMPS RCP8.5 AND RCP7.0 SCENARIOS.
Most doom-and-gloom projections for 2100 you’ve heard were based on RCP8.5. It featured in tens of thousands of peer-reviewed studies and countless media articles.
RCP8.5 was presented as a business-as-usual scenario.
That was clearly… pic.twitter.com/8aovnhIfTv— Dr Robert Ian Holmes PhD (@1000Frolly) May 18, 2026
In other words, after years of breathless headlines, policy overreach, and taxpayer-funded alarmism built on speculative extremes, even the IPCC is quietly backing away from its most indefensible assumptions…without really admitting how much damage those scenarios did.
Instead of a full course correction, we get a partial recalibration layered atop the same shaky framework, where “plausibility” is still more suggestion than requirement. If this is what passes for scientific accountability in the climate arena, no wonder people are increasingly wary of “experts” and are starting to ignore climate hysterics.
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IPCC :: climate change
IARC :: glyphosate
In other words, two tentacles of the UN, not voted on by us or within our jurisdiction, utterly corrupt and unanswerable to those they seek to rule, and most importantly ***WRONG*** have been wreaking havoc on western civilization.
Bad policies about both climate change and farming leads to famine; oh wait, famine is a favorite tool of totalitarianism isn’t it? Whaddacoincidence, huh?
Trump has severed us from the WHO (of which IARC is a part) and now it’s time to dump the UN.
Kick them out of NYC. Let Trump build condos in its place.
Unlike the whimsical climate change doom scenario which was always based on computer simulations and as we know, garbage in/garbage out/ there is actual research behind glyphosates. Are we all going to die from them or have glyphosates produced a bumper crop of food for a growing population? Which is the better trade off? That is an actual debate not the climate hysteria used to control our lives. and make some people like AlGore rich.
You can literally read research papers until your eyes fall out of your head there’s so much literature on glyphosate.
But remember, the dose makes the poison. Joe Sixpack who sprayed the weeds in his driveway could drink the amount of glyphosate and only have a stomach ache.
Joe the farmer is exposed to more glyphosate before his morning coffee than a thousand city dwellers over their entire lifetime. The difference is profound.
But according to the Agricultural Research Study, farmers are not contracting glyphosate related cancer. Period.
Both of these issues are of a piece – both are deeply rooted in a Malthusian worldview that requires fewer human beings inhabiting the planet (they want you to die so there’s more for them).
It’s a deeply cynical and outright evil viewpoint.
You see the same thing in nuclear energy. Pilots on commercial planes receive a much higher dose of radiation, because they are outside the densest layers of atmosphere, than most people. Same with people living in Denver. But we see NO increase in cancer rates at all, none. That well documented fact is not reflected in the regulations for nuclear power plants.
Climate science is the Poster Child for Narrative Science; where the “researchers” establish the narrative conclusion, then work back to manipulate the data to support the narrative. Also a strong example of modern day, Stalinist era, Lysenko-ism; support the Gov’t position or no funding. no publication, no job and social cancellation.
In traffic accident reconstruction we called it “results-driven analysis”. Same bogus process, same useless results.
Proposing a hypothesis and then designing an experiment to not test it but to reach a wanted conclusion has always been bad science. Unfortunately the university research grants are based on the later. If you do research that doesn’t find global warming a massive civilization killing problem you will get no money.
Scott Adams was right!
And the climate cultists owe him an apology, not that it’s coming any time soon.
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The IPCC is not the real baddy here (as bad as it may be). It merely collected the “science” and presented it, about two dozen possible scenarios. The problem was the media and Leftists (but I repeat myself) who emphasized the most dire models. (Which also happened to be the least likely.) Even the IPCC warned in its reports that the researchers’ results were not predictions and shouldn’t be promoted as such. This warning was ignored.
Ha ha! Exactly as BATF does with “trace data.’ And that warning’s ignored, too.
Trumps war in Iran is doing for gas prices and carbon emissions what the IPCC couldn’t. All this winning is hard to take at the gas pump. Ive pretty much had enough of the IRGC talking heads goading and gloating. Are we there, yet?
The TRUE value of solar: exposing the NWO cockroaches and making them scatter.
The more things change, the more they remain the same…
The climate grifters have been using a playbook derived from the Red Scare hype from the 1950s and 60s, that fueled the growth of the Military Industrial Complex which Eisenhower warned us about. “Assessments” of Soviet nuclear and conventional capabilities were deliberately exaggerated, and as a result I grew up expecting nuclear annihilation at any moment. Now we have neuroticised a whole new generation, who have been taught that humanity is the problem, and depopulation is part of the solution. So surprise surprise they aren’t having nearly as many kids. They have also been programmed to accept mammoth transfers of wealth that conveniently benefit the grifters. This will take decades to undo.
My granddaughter, who graduated from high school a few days ago, has mentioned her concern for having my great grandkids because of how bad the world is. I had to tell her nothing has changed and the same things were being said in the 1960s, yet here we are.
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Just tell her no worries, illiterate illegal immigrant voters will make up for all the babies she doesn’t have, and more.
nothings changed but the perception they want the public to breathe in
they are communistnazi loving junkies
People skip over a salient fact – the RCP 8.5 and similar scenarios assumed an 8X increase in coal mining and consumption. Any geologist could have told them such an assumption was absurd and impossible. We knew that the day the scenario was created, and many people said it at that time – this is impossible. But without the RCP 8.5 scenario, you could have all the “We are doomed” predictions, you couldn’t justify the astronomical expenditures, and people just glossed over the assumptions in the scenario.
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