Climate change is undoubtedly one of the most critical global governance issues of our time. To project the Earth's temperature over the coming decades, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has specifically designed several future scenarios, collectively known as Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs). Among them, RCP8.5 represents the highest emission scenario, where radiative forcing reaches 8.5 watts per square meter by 2100. This baseline is generally understood as a scenario where there is a continuously growing population and a global economy heavily reliant on fossil fuels, with no aggressive mitigation policies implemented. Under this framework, global average temperatures are projected to rise by approximately 3.2°C to 5.4°C relative to pre-industrial levels, with a median increase of around 4.3°C. Many tropical and subtropical regions would frequently exceed the limits of human physiological tolerance during summer, rendering certain areas no longer suitable for long-term outdoor survival due to extreme heat. Concurrently, the large-scale melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets would drive sea levels up by approximately 0.63 to 1.01 meters, leaving the vast majority of the world's major coastal cities, core ports, and low-lying island nations facing chronic flooding. Furthermore, extreme weather events would transition from anomalies to high-frequency occurrences, where super hurricanes, prolonged droughts, ultra-high-temperature heatwaves, and devastating wildfires would continuously disrupt agricultural, transportation, and energy systems, placing immense strain on global food supply chains and insurance sectors. As a worst-case baseline for high emissions, RCP8.5 has long been framed by mainstream media and certain activist groups as the "default future", i.e., the inevitable outcome if humanity takes no action. Consequently, it has served as authoritative data, dominating climate research, policy formulation, and public discourse.
As it stands, this baseline scenario is undergoing a major shift. In the UN Seventh Assessment Report framework (associated with CMIP7), the IPCC has decided to downgrade RCP8.5 to "implausible". According to the latest UN research, RCP8.5 is no longer considered a "business-as-usual" scenario, but rather a “worst case emissions scenario”. Put simply, past estimates of RCP8.5 under this "business-as-usual" condition were incorrect,
Why, then, are the projections associated with RCP8.5 being lowered?
The reason is that a series of key assumptions upon which the early RCP8.5 model was built have now significantly diverged from the real world and are highly unlikely to materialize. First, RCP8.5 assumes by default that global coal consumption will continue to grow at a high rate throughout the 21st century, eventually reaching several times today's level by 2100. In reality, however, coal consumption in major European and American economies entered a downward cycle long ago, and coal demand in primary industrial nations like China is gradually plateauing. The global energy structure has simply not followed a path of "infinite coal expansion". Second, the early models markedly underestimated the pace of clean energy technology evolution. Over the past decade and a half, industries such as solar photovoltaics, wind power, energy storage, electric vehicles, and lithium batteries have experienced expansion far exceeding expectations, with cost reductions for certain technologies progressing near the pace of Moore's Law. Their commercialization rate has vastly outstripped mainstream forecasts from around 2010. Furthermore, despite the ongoing escalation of contemporary geopolitical conflicts, major economies including China, the United States, and Europe have all launched long-term carbon neutrality strategies. An example of this would be China's target to peak carbon emissions by 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060. Consequently, global capital, industrial, and policy frameworks have already begun reallocation toward low-carbon pathways. Observing actual current emission trajectories, humanity is practically much closer to "middle-of-the-road emission scenarios" like RCP4.5 or SSP2-4.5, which project a global temperature rise of approximately 2°C to 3°C by 2100, rather than the fossil-fuel-hyper-expanded world described by RCP8.5. It is precisely for these reasons that RCP8.5 has gradually faded from its mainstream status as the widely accepted "default future".
The political implications of this shift are profound. U.S. President Donald Trump was quick to seize on the development. Following the sidelining of RCP8.5, he posted on social media, “"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!”
He fiercely attacked Democrats for long utilizing "climate alarmism" to terrify the American people, force through disastrous energy policies, and pour billions of dollars into "bogus research programs". Trump stated, "Unlike the Dumocrats, who use Climate Alarmism nonsense to push their GREEN NEW SCAM, my Administration will always be based on TRUTH, SCIENCE, and FACT!!". It is worth noting that mainstream English-language media critical of conservative values, such as the BBC and The Guardian, have remained almost entirely silent on this major adjustment to RCP8.5. Meanwhile, consistently anti-Trump media like The New York Times dedicated only minimal coverage to the story, focusing half of their reports on attacking Trump's remarks. Currently, only Dutch- and German-language media are exploring the research developments regarding RCP8.5 from an objective and scientific perspective.
Looking from the angle of political communication, Trump’s reaction and the silence of certain left-leaning media outlets are, in fact, not difficult to understand. Over the past decade and a half, the narrative of climate catastrophe within the Western political system has evolved far beyond a mere scientific issue. It has gradually transformed into a vital policy instrument for driving energy mandates, fiscal subsidies, green industrial investments, and ideological mobilization. Moreover, it has served as an underlying political logic, the foundational justification and rationale for all policy maneuvers and large-scale investments. Now, the official downgrading by the United Nations of RCP8.5, which is an extreme scenario long treated as the "default future", undoubtedly provides fresh rhetorical ammunition for forces opposing the "politics of climate panic". The reason this newfound rhetorical space carries genuine persuasive weight is precisely that the sidelining of RCP8.5 exposes an unavoidable logical contradiction.
Researchers at ANBOUND point out that a common explanation offered by the official establishment regarding the downgrade of RCP8.5 is that precisely because global emission reduction actions have been taken, the worst-case scenario is no longer valid. However, this explanation stands in self-contradiction with the long-held position of the UN system and mainstream climate advocates. For a long time, the scientific and policy communities repeatedly emphasized that current global mitigation efforts were "far from enough", that humanity was still heading toward a dangerous climate future, and that any policy falling short of radical action would be a catastrophic mistake. If that assessment holds true, how can these "far from enough" limited actions now be "sufficient" to downgrade the most extreme catastrophe scenario as a whole? Conversely, if limited actions really have been enough to sideline RCP8.5, it proves only one thing, that the original predictive model itself suffered from severe, systemic overestimation from the very beginning. The extreme future described by RCP8.5 was not so much "averted by human effort" as it was never fundamentally viable to materialize in reality. This is the true core of the controversy. Therefore, the original RCP8.5 projection was not only incorrect, but the discrepancy was substantial, with a conservative estimate putting the deviation at over 50%.
It is worth noting that this has ceased to be a purely technical issue and has progressively transformed into a credibility crisis for the global climate governance narrative itself. For a considerable time, climate politics relied heavily on the logic of "apocalyptic mobilization", employing extreme scenarios as the core justification for policy legitimacy. Under this narrative, high energy costs, hefty fiscal subsidies, staggering industrial transition costs, and even inflationary pressures were packaged as "the necessary price to pay to avoid the destruction of human civilization”. As the modeling system itself now begins to correct these extreme projections, the public will naturally press further, asking among the large-scale policies pushed in the past based on those catastrophic scenarios, how many were truly necessary? And how many bore the clear imprint of political amplification?
Bill Gates' climate memorandum, released ahead of COP30 in 2025, to some extent reflects this shift in thinking. He explicitly posited that while climate change is certainly severe, it will not lead to the end of human civilization. He argued that the future focus of climate governance should shift from being solely centered around "emission numbers" and "temperature targets" to paying greater attention to poverty, health, agricultural resilience, and societal adaptation capabilities. Gates' assertions sparked considerable controversy at the time, but their true significance lies in the fact that even long-term proponents of climate action and clean energy investment have begun to actively distance themselves from "apocalyptic climate narratives”. This shift marks the entry of the global climate agenda into a new phase, moving gradually from a mobilization logic of "avoiding doomsday at all costs" toward a pragmatic framework where "climate change must be addressed, but the policies themselves must account for cost, efficiency, and real-world affordability". Whether a policy is reasonable should no longer depend solely on whether it aligns with a certain "green correctness", but rather on whether it can genuinely lower social costs, improve resource efficiency, enhance public livelihoods, and strengthen societal resilience in the face of long-term climate change.
For China, this shift actually provides validation that its policy determination centered on energy conservation, emission reduction, and pollution control hits the spot. The correction of RCP8.5 undoubtedly offers nations around the world a vital opportunity to recalibrate their own climate strategies. In practice, the core of China's strategy for addressing climate change, unlike the radical tactics of other nations, has consistently emphasized "conservation" and "efficiency". This policy orientation is fundamentally distinct from the logic of "apocalyptic mobilization" frequently utilized in Western climate politics. Consequently, China's green practices have the potential to establish a new paradigm, creating a balanced framework between pragmatic development and climate response that avoids the blindness of "political correctness". This approach genuinely addresses the long-standing opposition of climate interests between developing and developed nations. It serves not only as the direction for China's climate diplomacy but also as a crucial foundation for China to secure a greater voice in the evolving landscape of global governance.
Final analysis conclusion:
The exit of the RCP8.5 catastrophe scenario means that the "apocalyptic climate narrative" that has dominated global discourse for over a decade is losing its scientific foundation as a "default future". This demonstrates that past political communication and policy narratives, constructed in part upon extreme projections, suffered from evident overestimation and artificial amplification. Global climate governance is progressively shifting from "apocalyptic mobilization" to "real-world governance", moving away from a sole emphasis on catastrophic panic toward a framework that places greater value on cost, efficiency, technological progress, and societal adaptation capabilities.
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Zhijiang Zhao is a Research Fellow for Geopolitical Strategy programme at ANBOUND, an independent think tank.
