The downgrading of the climate apocalypse
For years, the climate debate in the West has treated the end of the world not as a possibility, but as a timetable.
In January 2019, Greta Thunberg told the World Economic Forum that “our house is on fire” and that she wanted world leaders to “panic”. In April 2019, on a panel with the Conservative’s Michael Gove, Labour’s Ed Miliband, the Green’s Caroline Lucas and the Lib Dem’s Laila Moran, she told the UK Parliament: “You [the political class] did not act in time.” Later that year, she told the UN Climate Action Summit that “we are in the beginning of a mass extinction.” Her message was not just that climate change was real. It was that normal politics, compromise and gradual adjustment had become immoral evasions. The instruction to world leaders was clear. Fear first. Policy afterwards.
Extinction Rebellion took this further. Its activists warned that “billions of people are going to die”. Its co-founder Roger Hallam, who also co-founded Just Stop Oil, said “our children are going to die in the next 10 to 20 years”. Their direct action was justified by activists, journalists and politicians on the grounds that democratic politics had failed, persuasion was too slow, and only disruption could force the public to face the “climate emergency”.
Netflix’s Don’t Look Up popularised the same logic. The experts have seen catastrophe coming, the public is too distracted to understand it, and anyone questioning the panic is complicit in disaster.
David Wallace-Wells, now a New York Times writer, gave the educated classes the literary version. The Uninhabitable Earth opened with the line, “It is worse, much worse, than you think.”
Now one of the central scientific props beneath this apocalyptic mood has been removed.
The body that sets the standard scenarios for global climate models has now ruled that the old worst-case pathway is no longer realistic. SSP5-8.5, the successor to RCP8.5, assumed a world of soaring fossil fuel use, especially coal, and little effective climate policy. That is not the world we are now in. The scenario that underpinned much of the apocalyptic climate debate has been formally judged “implausible”.
Energy realists have been warning about this for years - Matt Ridley first flagged it back in 2014. So did some green pragmatists like Michael Liebreich in 2019 and journals like Nature in 2020. In December 2025, Tim Harford presented a programme for the BBC about where it all went wrong.
The argument was straightforward then and is now impossible to ignore. RCP8.5 was never a realistic forecast of the future. It was an extreme pathway built on assumptions that no longer fit the world. It required a vast expansion of coal use, very high emissions growth and a failure of technological progress that has not happened.
But the deeper failure, as the US academic Roger Pielke Jr argues, was institutional. Climate research allowed a low-probability, high-impact scenario to be treated as “business as usual”. A stress test became a baseline. A deliberately extreme pathway became the foundation for academic papers, media stories, financial risk models and political campaigns. That distorted the public’s understanding of climate risk and made the worst case look like the expected case. As Matt Ridley has pointed out, even the UK’s Met Office has used RCP8.5 to inform their forecasts and public communications.
Pielke Jr paid heavily for saying so. He was not arguing that climate change was fake. He accepted that climate change was real and that greenhouse gas emissions justified action. His offence was different. It was just that he refused to confuse evidence with activism. For that, he was treated as an enemy of the cause.
The silence from much of the media is now striking. Many of the outlets that amplified RCP8.5 based claims have shown little interest in explaining that the scenario behind much of the alarm has now been discarded as implausible (only GB News and The Times have covered the story).
But this goes far beyond Net Zero. It is another blow to trust in elite institutions.
People recognise the pattern. Iraq was justified on intelligence the Chilcot Report later described as flawed. The financial crisis exposed regulators and central bankers who failed to see systemic risk building in plain sight. Grooming gangs revealed extensive failures by police and local authorities.
The details differ. But the pattern is familiar. Experts overstate certainty. Officials close ranks. Media organisations police the boundaries of acceptable opinion. Dissenters are treated as cranks or bad actors. Years later, the story changes, but accountability is limited and those who asked reasonable questions are rarely vindicated.
RCP8.5 should be treated as a warning. Not a reason to pretend climate risks do not exist. But a warning against the politics of manufactured certainty and moral panic.
The climate debate now needs less apocalypse and more judgement. It needs less emotional theatrics and more engineering and level-headedness. It needs fewer claims about imminent civilisational collapse and more attention to security, affordability, and growth.
The public can cope with trade-offs. What it cannot tolerate indefinitely is being frightened into compliance by institutions that later change the assumptions and pretend nothing important has happened.