Why Climate Models Are Changing Course

For years, the most extreme climate scenarios shaped headlines, policy debates, and public fear—despite growing evidence that many of those projections were increasingly detached from real-world energy and emissions trends. Now, in a major shift ahead of the IPCC’s Seventh Assessment Report, climate modelers are quietly abandoning some of their most dramatic assumptions. In this episode of Sanity Check, David R. Legates breaks down the rise and fall of RCP8.5 and SSP5-8.5, the “worst-ca...