An international team of researchers has pulled a high-emissions climate scenario under which no efforts are made to curb climate change. This model, called RCP8.5, represented what was thought to be the worst climate change could get. But thanks to strides in renewable energy and emissions reductions, it is now largely considered improbable.
It’s difficult to determine how climate change will affect the future “because how much the planet will warm depends in large part on what humans do,” said Vox. So scientists build “structured guesses about how the next century might unfold under different assumptions about energy use, growth and climate policy.” These scenarios get updated every seven years.
The “use of RCP8.5 in climate modeling has remained, in part, as a way to study what might happen” if the “world does nothing to tackle climate change,” said The Washington Post. It has also “provided fodder for attacks,” with skeptics like President Donald Trump arguing that “scientists, activists and the media have overstated the risks that actually exist and given outsized attention to the most extreme scenario.”
These updated predictions are a “sign the expansion of solar, wind, electric vehicles and batteries have slowed emissions growth,” Andrew King, an associate professor of climate science at the University of Melbourne, said at The Conversation. “Taking RCP8.5 off the table is a sign of progress.” But the new worst case is still bad, and scientists also removed the best-case option. Essentially, the scenarios are “becoming less pessimistic but also less optimistic,” said The New York Times. |
