Reasonable doubt? How The Free Press covers climate change Highlight

But IPCC reports describe a range of possible climate outcomes, outlined in four specific scenarios, based on how countries around the world could respond to the climate crisis. RCP8.5 was always the high-end emissions scenario—a prediction of what would happen in “a dystopian future that is fossil-fuel intensive and excludes any climate mitigation policies,” as the former director of Breakthrough’s climate and energy program, Zeke Hausfather, and Norwegian climate expert Glen Peters explained in a 2020 Nature article (Hausfather 2020). Hausfather has explored how this unlikely scenario came to be misleadingly described by many scholars and journalists as “business as usual,” but the crucial point is that it was never the most likely trajectory (Hausfather 2019).