The Scale of the Damage: By the Numbers
Here is what makes this moment so extraordinary — and so damning. According to data compiled by
Roger Pielke Jr. using Google Scholar, between 2018 and 2021 alone, approximately 17,000 academic papers were published using RCP 8.5. Another 16,900 followed in the subsequent three-year period — meaning the usage of the scenario barely slowed even as its flaws became widely known inside the scientific community.
Those academic papers did not stay in journals.
Science “journalism” amplified them.
Each alarming study generated news articles, television segments, radio reports, social media posts, and classroom curricula. Conservative estimates suggest that the total number of media articles worldwide referencing RCP 8.5 projections — directly or through the studies that used it — runs into the hundreds of thousands, possibly approaching a million pieces of content over the scenario’s two-decade lifespan. Every one of them carried some version of the same message: this is where we are headed.
Pielke Jr. put it plainly: “
Tens of thousands of research papers have been — and continue to be — published using these scenarios, a similar number of media headlines have amplified their findings, and governments and international organizations have built these implausible scenarios into policy and regulation. We now know that all of this is built on a foundation of sand.”
A foundation of sand. That is not a skeptic talking. That is one of the most widely cited climate researchers in the world — writing at
The American Enterprise Institute — describing what happened on the scientific establishment’s watch.
The policy consequences of that foundation of sand cannot be overstated. RCP 8.5 provided the scientific cover for policies that, by any honest description, amount to government seizure of the energy economy — the kind of top-down control over production, consumption, and individual choice that previous generations would have recognized as socialism by another name. Mandated vehicle eliminations, forced retirement of power plants, prohibitions on gas appliances, trillion-dollar ‘transition’ spending programs — all of it justified, ultimately, by impact studies running a scenario the scientific community has now declared impossible.
The "most significant development in climate research in decades," has an ugly side.
wattsupwiththat.com
Decades long brain ****