The context you need, when you need it

When news breaks, you need to understand what actually matters — and what to do about it. At Vox, our mission to help you make sense of the world has never been more vital. But we can’t do it on our own.

We rely on readers like you to fund our journalism. Will you support our work and become a Vox Member today?

Climate change’s worst-case scenario is officially canceled

What comes next will depend on us.

You’ve probably never heard of the term “RCP 8.5” — the highest-emission scenario used by climate scientists to project the planet’s future. But if you’ve read about climate change, you’ve seen the numbers and nightmarish outcomes it produced: 4°C of warming by 2100, sometimes 5°C, sea level rising multiple feet, parts of the planet too hot for humans.

A weekly dose of stories chronicling progress around the world.

Those numbers shaped a decade and a half of climate journalism, including a lot of my own when I covered climate change at Time magazine. I didn’t always know — and didn’t always communicate — that the scenario behind the most apocalyptic, attention-getting findings was largely an attempt to imagine how bad things could get, not a true forecast. But I wasn’t alone. RCP 8.5 was a frequent background presence in climate journalism.

Renewable energy just broke a 100-year-old streak

Last month, though, the scientists who built that scenario formally retired it. In a paper published in Geoscientific Model Development, Detlef van Vuuren and more than 40 co-authors eliminated RCP 8.5 from the scenarios that will feed into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Seventh Assessment Report, which is due in 2029. Based on falling clean-energy costs, climate policy, and recent emissions trends, the highest-emissions pathway had become, in their words, “implausible.”

5 ways we’re making progress on climate change

I can understand if your eyes began glazing over as soon as you read “seventh assessment report,” but this shift represents real progress and hope. It means that the apocalyptic climate change future that we’ve been describing for 15 years is officially no longer on the table. Instead, a merely bad climate future — about 2.8°C by 2100 — is now the central scientific estimate. Given how hopeless our climate future has appeared at times, that really does qualify as good news.

Climate models can’t tell you the future on their........

© Vox