Forget #ExxonKnew - It’s Time to Uncover #TheyKnew

By Anthony Watts

For years, Americans have been bombarded with one simple climate campaign message: “Exxon knew.”

We were told the oil company understood decades ago that carbon dioxide emissions might affect the climate yet allegedly concealed that information. The slogan #ExxonKnew has fueled lawsuits, congressional investigations, documentaries, and countless headlines.

If knowing something, failing to tell the public, and allowing bad information to shape public policy are worthy of national outrage, then let’s apply that same standard across the board, because there is a far more important question today.

Who knew that one of the most influential future climate scenarios ever created had become scientifically indefensible almost 10 years ago, and why did they keep using it anyway?

That scenario was Representative Concentration Pathways version 8.5, or in climate parlance, simply RCP8.5. For more than a decade, RCP8.5 has become the foundation for modern climate alarmism. It drove thousands of scientific papers, government regulations, financial risk assessments, school textbooks, corporate ESG reports, lawsuits against energy companies, and an endless stream of media stories predicting catastrophic futures.

It was routinely described as the world’s “business as usual” climate future. Except, it wasn’t.

RCP8.5 was originally designed as an extreme stress test. Like engineers designing a bridge to survive a once-in-a-thousand-year earthquake, climate scientists wanted to examine what would happen under extraordinarily high greenhouse gas emissions.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with that; the problem came later.

Instead of remaining an extreme sensitivity experiment, RCP8.5 quietly became the default scenario used to describe our expected future. That transformation from outlier to “business as usual” was never scientifically justified.

By 2017, researchers were already pointing out in scientific publications the serious flaws in the scenario’s assumptions, particularly its unrealistic projections for coal consumption. In 2020, climate scientists Zeke Hausfather and Glen Peters published an article in Nature explaining that RCP8.5 should no longer be treated as the most likely future.

Roger Pielke Jr. and Justin Ritchie later argued it had lost touch with reality, and that continuing to use it as a baseline represented a serious failure of scientific integrity.

Notice something important here: These were not so-called "climate deniers."

They were respected climate researchers publishing in the world’s leading scientific journals. Yet despite their credentials and track record, remarkably little changed.

Government agencies continued relying on RCP8.5-derived projections. Courts heard climate cases built around its assumptions. More than 140 central banks incorporated related scenarios into financial stress tests. Universities taught students using projections rooted in RCP8.5. News organizations continued publishing frightening headlines and graphics based upon it.

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Eventually, the successor scenario SSP5-8.5 was retired from the international framework used for the next generation of climate model experiments.

That is exactly how science is supposed to work. As science improves, models evolve or are replaced, and assumptions are revised. But here’s the catch: Scientific transparency is supposed to improve along with them. It didn’t.

Instead, something very different happened. The media essentially ignored one of the largest, good news stories in climate science in a decade. Now, imagine if the opposite scenario occurred. Suppose carbon dioxide emissions had suddenly exceeded the worst-case RCP8.5 projections.

There’s little doubt that newspapers, radio, and TV would have declared that climate scientists had underestimated the crisis. Headlines would warn of impending doom, cable news would likely start featuring dramatic countdown clocks like the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists “Doomsday Clock.” Politicians, of course, would be demanding immediate action to “save the planet.”

Instead, when one of the most influential scenarios in climate communication was quietly acknowledged to be implausible, there was almost complete media silence. No national reckoning, no prime-time specials, and no widespread explanation to the public that one of the principal foundations of countless alarming projections had effectively been abandoned.

That silence from the media deserves heavy scrutiny. A point to consider first: None of this means that climate change is imaginary. What it does mean is that the public deserves honesty about the flawed climate model assumptions used to justify expensive public policies. There is a profound difference between studying an extreme possibility and presenting that possibility as the most likely future.

For years, the dividing line between those two ideas became blurred. Bold claims of a significantly hotter future fueled by RCP 8.5 influenced regulations, investment decisions, energy policy, insurance markets, litigation, and public opinion became the norm.

Now that the scientific community has largely moved on, shouldn’t the public be told why? These uncomfortable questions practically ask themselves; no senior reporter with years of experience is required.

So, here are the tough questions that need to be asked:

Why were policymakers, investors, educators, and ordinary citizens never clearly informed that the scenario underpinning so many frightening predictions was no longer regarded by many of its own architects as the most realistic future?

Those questions deserve answers. For years, we have heard about what Exxon supposedly knew decades ago. Perhaps the more important story is what influential scientists, government agencies, advocacy groups, and media organizations knew much more recently, and why so many continued acting as though nothing had changed.

Maybe the biggest climate scandal isn’t #ExxonKnew. Instead, maybe as a new website from the American Enterprise Institute ponders, it’s #TheyKnew.

Anthony Watts ([email protected]) is a Senior Fellow for Environment and Climate at The Heartland Institute.

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