“Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5” (RCP 8.5) is a global warming trajectory trotted out by the Trudeau government, publicly funded institutes and climate activists when they want to raise public alarm about climate change. It is also so ridiculously implausible that, as Roger Pielke, Jr., of the University of Colorado Boulder reports, the Biden Administration is abandoning it. This is the same Biden Administration whose signal policy “achievement” is its announcement last year of $US391 billion in climate change spending dressed up as “inflation reduction.”

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In fact, not only is the Biden Administration abandoning RCP 8.5, but its Environmental Protection Agency rejected it with some force in a draft report last fall on the theme of incorporating recent scientific advances into regulatory decision-making. Of five climate scenarios considered, the EPA reported, RCP 8.5 is a “high emissions scenario” and the socioeconomic projection paired with RCP 8.5 is the only one with CO2 emissions projections outside the 1st to 99th percentile range. And “outside” is an understatement: according to a chart in the EPA document, projected global carbon dioxide emissions in 2100 under this scenario are about 50 per cent higher than the 99th percentile threshold.

The EPA’s recent slap-down of RCP 8.5 is significant, but it has been widely known for years that the scenario is highly improbable. In fact, when it was first published in the journal Climate Change in 2011, its authors noted it was the pathway “with the highest greenhouse gas emissions.” Climatologist Patrick J. Michaels suggested RCP 8.5 was so unrealistic it was obsolete even when it was published. And an article in Nature in January 2020 that was later cited by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change described RCP 8.5 as a scenario that “paints a dystopian future” that has become “increasingly implausible with every passing year.”

Nevertheless, it is the favoured scenario of alarmists such as at the Canadian Climate Institute, a supposedly independent organization financed by a five-year funding agreement with the federal government. Unrealistic predictions of widespread climate destruction are the institute’s stock-in-trade, as seen in, among other examples, its five-part series of reports on the costs of climate change, which spans nearly 400 pages. Throughout the reports the institute’s researchers use two climate scenarios, a “low-emissions” scenario they admit is most realistic and a “high-emissions” one that corresponds to RCP 8.5.

When choosing between the more realistic scenario and the one with 2100 emissions the Biden Administration’s EPA puts at about 50 per cent higher than the 99th percentile threshold, the Canadian Climate Institute naturally gives projections based on the implausible scenario much more prominence in its media releases, and splashes alarmist claims based on RCP 8.5 projections across its website. One example: its claim that “towards the end of the century ground-level ozone could cause over a quarter of a million people per decade to be hospitalized or die prematurely, with an annual cost of about $250 billion.” Or that job losses from climate change in Canada “could double by mid-century, and increase to 2.9 million by end-of-century.”

In its own reports the federal government also features RCP 8.5 more prominently than more realistic scenarios. A word search of the government’s 2019 national assessment on climate change, a 444-page report spanning eight chapters, finds a whopping 122 mentions of RCP 8.5, compared to 80 mentions of the low-emissions RCP 2.6 and a combined 32 mentions of medium-emission scenarios RCP 4.5 and RCP 6. There are also six regional assessments, containing 500 more pages of climate alarmism. Predictions of widespread fires, massive losses of income and other calamities based on RCP 8.5 feature prominently throughout.

These unrealistic projections are then reported straight by the media, including the public broadcaster. For example, a CBC story based on the federal report on climate in Atlantic Canada said “sea levels are expected to rise within 75 to 100 centimetres before the end of the century” and that by the 2080s, Fredericton, New Brunswick, will experience 53 days per year of temperatures 30 degrees or higher. The CBC story presents such projections as the expected case. In fact, they are based on the high-emissions scenario — RCP 8.5. The Biden Administration’s EPA has finally admitted RCP 8.5 is nonsense; Canada’s federal government and publicly funded institutes and media should now do the same.

Matthew Lau is a Toronto writer.