Energy

New York Times Publishes Story Admitting Climate Doomsday Predictions May Have Been Overblown

Ajay Suresh/Wikimedia Commons

The New York Times on Tuesday acknowledged the rollback of an extreme global warming scenario it previously used as headline fodder.

The New York Times addressed doomsday model Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5.’s (“RCP 8.5”) rescission in “Why Scientists Retired The Dire Climate Scenario Used For Over A Decade.” The New York Times published numerous alarmist headlines based on RCP 8.5 since it debuted in August 2011.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found in April that RCP 8.5 and other comparable climate models “have become implausible.” Some critics argued the model depended on unrealistic coal consumption numbers and was implausible when first released.

The NYT ran articles with headlines such as “The Great Climate Migration Has Begun” and “How Climate Migration Will Reshape America” in 2020, seemingly justifying mass migration on the basis of global warming.

“The stark policy choices are already becoming apparent. As refugees stream out of the Middle East and North Africa into Europe and from Central America into the United States, an anti-immigrant backlash has propelled nationalist governments into power around the world,” the former article reads. “The alternative, driven by a better understanding of how and when people will move, is governments that are actively preparing, both materially and politically, for the greater changes to come.”

“The model shows that the political responses to both climate change and migration can lead to drastically different futures,” the article continues.

In 2017, The New York Times published “As Climate Changes, Southern States Will Suffer More Economic Damage,” predicting mass die-offs from increased global temperatures.

“The projected increase in heat-related deaths by the end of this century would be roughly equivalent to the number of Americans killed annually in auto accidents,” the article reads.

“Teach About Climate Change With These 24 New York Times Graphs” promoted its RCP 8.5  interpretation as a teaching tool in. It predicts adverse affects for the U.S. South’s economy, healthcare and crime rates.

In 2018, “A Rise In Murder? Let’s Talk About The Weather” presented links between hot temperatures and homicide and noted that “ignoring the connection seems unwise given another trend: climate change.”

The NYT Editorial Board published “Climate Change Is Not Negotiable” in 2022, arguing for radical revisions to the U.S. economy and government to forestall global warming’s allegedly devastating consequences.

“Some of us have been talking about this for almost a decade. The fact that it took so long is a big problem. There will be significant consequences as the world unwinds from the extreme scenarios,” American Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Roger Pielke previously told the Daily Caller News Foundation when asked about media usage of RCP 8.5. “Science is self-correcting but sometimes that process takes too long.”