May
10
2026

From the Archives: You May Be in an Abusive Relationship

From five years ago, an image grabbed from Daniel J. Mitchell's Statism in Five Images; scroll down enough so you see the punchline.

[Abusive Relationships]

Back in 2021 we were doing that Covid thing, so some of those items were arguably more relevant then. But, to be fair, some seem even more applicable now.

Also of note:

  • As far as "Control what you read, watch, and say" goes… Roger Pielke Jr looks at Media Coverage (or not) of RCP8.5 RIP.

    Last week here at [his "Honest Broker" substack], I published a post announcing the most significant development in climate science in decades. It is truly huge news.

    The international committee responsible for official IPCC scenarios had declared the high-end scenarios — RCP8.5, SSP5-8.5, and SSP3-7.0 — to be implausible. These scenarios have dominated climate research, headlines, and policy for the better part of two decades.

    Today I review who in the “mainstream” media has covered this major story and who has so far ignored it.

    Bottom line: although the death of the doomsday scenarios has gotten some play in Danish and German-language media, "there has not been a peep from the major U.S. or international news outlets that publish in English."

    But (good news) I found something in the WSJ. Albeit, in an op-ed: You Can’t Trust ‘Climate Economics’ (WSJ gifted link) Excerpt:

    For more than a decade, researchers built many of their climate projections on the back of a hypothetical standardized scenario called Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5—a vision of the future which required coal consumption to quintuple by 2100 based on assumptions about future energy use. Those assumptions have already diverged sharply from actual energy trends, and we know today that the scenario is implausibly extreme. That conclusion isn’t fringe or even controversial. Yet many scientists continue to emphasize RCP8.5 in climate research, with new studies published daily. The outdated scenario likely persists because of the slow schedule for updating scenario assumptions, the incentive researchers face to publish headline-grabbing results, and a climate advocacy ecosystem built on apocalyptic warnings.

    Thousands of studies use it. Projections of flood damage, heat mortality, agricultural disruption and wildfire risk have rested on an implausible baseline that describes an imaginary, modeled future. Governments and financial institutions have treated these projections as the accurate scientific picture of the climate future.

    The author of that op-ed: Roger Pielke Jr.