This editorial appeared in the June 6, 2026 edition of the NH Union Leader
The recent retirement of RCP 8.5, long the favorite model of climate alarmism, is being spun by some commentators as evidence that “climate science worked exactly as intended.” Policymakers acted. Technology improved. Emissions were curbed. And through masterful collective action, the world supposedly averted the most catastrophic pathway predicted by this model and its near and distant cousins.
A different and more honest interpretation, however, deserves serious consideration. RCP 8.5 was never designed to be a realistic or probable forecast of the future. It was an extreme stress-test scenario, deliberately constructed with highly improbable assumptions such as explosive growth in coal consumption, almost no technological progress, rising emissions intensity, and population growth reaching levels that credentialed demographers already viewed to be unrealistic at the time the model was created.
In practical terms, RCP 8.5 functioned like a toxicology study in which laboratory animals are given massive doses to observe physiological stresses at the margin, far beyond anything a human would ever encounter. No serious scientist or clinician treats those extreme doses as predictions of real human exposure. Yet for more than a decade, RCP 8.5 was routinely presented to the public and policymakers as certainty. This single extreme scenario became the foundation for many of the most alarming climate narratives such as predictions of increasing uninhabitable regions, widespread crop failure, mass starvation, and even civilizational collapse.
The quiet retirement of this fantastically hypothetical specter is, therefore, not merely a technical adjustment in modeling. It represents an implicit acknowledgment that large portions of public climate discourse were built on assumptions that were never plausible.
Even today, many of the revised “middle ground” modeling pathways still carry forward some of the same biases. They continue to emphasize downside risks while consistently underestimating both humanity’s remarkable capacity to rapidly innovate, and the positive driving force of economic incentives and technological progress.
This matters profoundly because human civilization has always advanced through increasing mastery of energy. For roughly 400,000 years, anatomically modern humans lived as hunter-gatherers, constrained almost entirely by the limits of muscle power, firewood, and primitive tools. Every major leap forward, including, but not limited to, the development of agriculture, industrialization, modern sanitation, transportation, medicine, global communications, and hyperscale personal computing has been powered by expanding access to abundant, reliable, and affordable energy.
Cheap and scalable energy is not merely another economic input. It is the very foundation of modern life, resilience, and prosperity. It raises living standards, reduces poverty, extends life expectancy, improves food production, and enables the technological innovation that solves vexing human problems. Societies with abundant energy are far better equipped to handle environmental challenges, invest in cleaner technologies, and build resilient infrastructure. Wealthier societies consistently protect their environments more effectively because they possess the surplus capital to do so.
The impressive advances we have seen in solar power, battery storage, natural gas efficiency, nuclear technology, and industrial optimization over the last two decades did not primarily emerge from austerity, degrowth ideology, or top-down mandates. They emerged from human creativity, competitive markets, engineering excellence, and the natural human drive to improve and excel. Technological evolution, not civilizational contraction, has been the real engine of both environmental gains and rising human welfare.
This reality helps explain why framing climate change as a simple binary battle between “science” and so-called “denial” has been so counterproductive and, at times, genuinely harmful. Many thoughtful critics of extreme climate projections agree that climate change is occurring and human activity likely plays a role. What rational thinkers reject is the repeated practice of presenting speculative, worst-case scenarios as the most likely future while minimizing humanity’s proven capacity to adapt, substitute, and innovate.
The retirement of RCP 8.5 (and two other like models) should, therefore, prompt a broader reassessment of how climate science should be communicated. Worst-case stress tests are legitimate and useful tools in scientific research. They help us understand the outer boundaries of what is theoretically possible. The problem arises when those extreme scenarios migrate from technical literature into public messaging without proper context about their low probability.
Responsible policy should not ignore environmental risk, but rather, it must weigh genuine concerns against the equally real needs of economic growth, energy reliability, industrial competitiveness, and human welfare. A pragmatic strategy that prioritizes innovation and abundance offers a far superior path forward than an ideological crusade against hydrocarbon energy regardless of economic or humanitarian consequences.
The clear lesson from the retirement of RCP 8.5 is this. Stress tests are valuable, but they become dangerous when sold to the public as baseline expectations. If humanity continues to prioritize technological innovation, efficient energy production, economic growth, and scientific advancement, our future will almost certainly be far brighter and more prosperous than the transmogrified apocalyptic visions that dominated climate discourse for much of the past 15 years.