On the Post Mortem Relevance of RCP8.5
A lot of propaganda has been circulating in recent weeks concerning the IPCC's decision to remove RCP8.5 from use in the upcoming AR7 report. The decision is a good one, and I want to show why below with a simple toy model I created. I think it's fair to say that RCP8.5 is no longer a plausible future, given current emission reductions and the shrinking prices of renewable energy sources. For some very insightful comments from others about the death of RCP8.5, see Zeke Hausfather's post at Climate Brink (Michael Mann's comments on it here) and the wonderful information at Climate Action Tracker . But the the usual suspects among contrarian political activists have been portraying the IPCC's decision as a win for "skeptics" and/or as an admission that the IPCC's projections have been fraudulent, such that over a decade of research that used RCP8.5 can now be safely discarded. Nothing could be further from the truth; it's actually an indication t...