This April, the international scientific committee that designs climate scenarios for the United Nations did something it should have done a decade ago. It officially retired SSP5–8.5 — the corollary to the infamous RCP 8.5 — declaring the scenario “implausible” and removing it from the framework that will underpin the next IPCC assessment.
For more than fifteen years, that scenario powered nearly every terrifying climate headline you have ever read: vanishing coastlines, uninhabitable cities, mass extinction, civilization collapse. It is also what millions of American schoolchildren were taught as the future — not as a remote stress test, but as established fact.
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It was never the future. And the people who kept saying it was knew better.
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RCP 8.5 was designed in 2011 not as a forecast but as a 90th-percentile worst-case stress test, built on assumptions its own modelers admitted were extreme: 12 billion people on Earth by 2100, technology effectively frozen in place, and a fivefold global increase in coal use that exceeded what geologists believe can even be mined. Scientists began warning it was implausible in 2017. A landmark 2020 paper in Nature said it “becomes increasingly implausible with every passing year.” Former President Joe Biden’s EPA quietly pulled it from regulatory analysis in 2022 — concluding it fell outside the 1st-to-99th-percentile range of plausible futures.
They knew. They used it anyway.
By 2024, new academic studies citing RCP 8.5 were still appearing at 25 per day. The U.S. National Climate Assessment relied on it as recently as 2023. More than 17,000 papers from 2022 through 2025 used the scenario, meaning its use barely slowed even as its flaws were widely known inside the scientific community. Roger Pielke Jr. and Justin Ritchie called the continued use of RCP 8.5 “one of the most significant failures of scientific integrity in the twenty-first century.” They were not exaggerating.
And while scientists, journals, and editors looked the other way, the scenario was poured straight into American classrooms.
Six states now mandate K–12 climate education built around projections drawn from RCP 8.5. The California Federation of Teachers has urged its members to begin climate instruction in kindergarten and treat it as a “moral obligation” to make climate education “ubiquitous within the curricula.” The American Federation of Teachers has instructed its members to “teach the scientifically accepted perspective on global warming and climate change — not debate it.” Textbooks cited the most extreme projections as outcomes. Documentary films dramatized the consequences. Children listening absorbed a message no child should ever be handed as established fact: the world is ending, and there is nothing anyone can do.
The data on what that has done to a generation are sobering. A Lancet study of 10,000 young people found that 59% are “very or extremely worried” about climate change, with nearly half saying it affects their daily functioning. Researchers warned that “subjecting young people to climate anxiety and moral injury can be regarded as cruel, inhuman, degrading, or even torturous.” One in four Australian children aged 10 to 14 worried the world would end before they grew up. A 2025 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found one in five young Americans aged 16 to 24 are afraid to have children. Morgan Stanley has warned investors that climate fear is measurably depressing fertility rates.
These children were not frightened by what is happening to the climate. They were frightened by a now-discredited computer scenario its own creators admitted would never come to pass.
This was not an honest mistake. It was a sustained choice — by scientists who knew the scenario was implausible after 2020 and kept using it, by journals that kept publishing, by media that kept framing it as the future, and by educators who built it into curricula as settled fact. Each actor was rewarded: researchers with grants and citations, media with clicks, NGOs with funding, governments with new spending authority. The incentives all ran in one direction. The truth ran the other way.
The scenario committee has finally said what should have been said five years ago: SSP5–8.5 is implausible and gone from the framework. The Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant ran the story on its front page under the headline, “UN Climate Panel Drops Doomsday Scenario.” Its science journalist wrote, “Almost everything you read about the climate future is wrong.”
Meanwhile, The New York Times, the BBC, Nature, Science, and The Guardian have said nothing.
So someone should say it. American schools should immediately correct curricula built around RCP 8.5. Teachers’ unions should stop framing climate alarm as a moral duty and treat science as something to teach, not enforce.
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Journalists who built careers on the doomsday scenario should issue corrections. And the scientific institutions that knew RCP 8.5 was indefensible and used it anyway should be held to account.
A generation of children was told the world was ending. They deserve the truth: it isn’t, and the doomsday scenario they were raised on was always fiction. Now it is officially retired. So is the excuse for terrifying our children.
The Honorable Jason Isaac is the CEO of the American Energy Institute and previously served four terms in the Texas House of Representatives.
