UN Secretary General António Guterres meeting European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen during the Belém Climate Summit (COP30), November 2025. Photo UN Climate Change / Kiara Worth / Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
The Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP), the international committee responsible for producing the assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has just published the next generation of climate scenarios. And they differ markedly from the previous doomsday forecasts.
This new framework has eliminated the most extreme scenarios that have dominated climate research for decades – including RCP8.5 (Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5), which predicted a 5 degree increase in global temperatures by 2100.
The IPCC has had to withdraw this forecast. It now deems implausible the extreme scenarios that it has employed to justify the extreme policy reaction of trying to commit the world to net zero by 2050. This is an important development, which ought to change climate policy.
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