RCP8.5 – Super Facts

The goal of this blog is to create a list of what I call super facts. Super facts are important true facts that nevertheless are surprising to many, misunderstood, or disputed among the non-experts. They are special facts that we all can learn something important from. However, I also make posts that are not super facts but feature other interesting information, such as this book review and book recommendation. I should say that this book is not written by a scientist but an environmentalist, and he did not provide references for his hundreds of factual claims. However, I fact checked at least 20 claims and found only one that was not entirely correct, so I think his facts are for the part correct. The book is:

Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization by Bill McKibben

Below I am listing the four versions of this book. I bought the hardback version.

Hardback – Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company (August 19, 2025), ISBN-10 : 1324106239, ISBN-13 : 978-1324106234, 224 pages, item weight : 12 ounces, dimensions : 5.8 x 0.9 x 8.6 inches. It costs $15.91on US Amazon. Click here to order it from Amazon.com.
Paperback – Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company (August 11, 2026), ISBN-10 : 1324130628, ISBN-13 : 978-1324130628, 240 pages, item weight : 13 ounces, dimensions : 1 x 5.5 x 8.25 inches. It costs $19.99 on US Amazon. Click here to order it from Amazon.com.
Kindle – Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company (August 19, 2025), ASIN : B0DXQGBM4Z, 220 pages, it costs $9.40 on US Amazon. Click here to order it from Amazon.com.
Audiobook – Publisher : Highbridge Audio (August 19, 2025), ASIN : B0F95QL1C2, Listening length : 7 hours and 36 minutes. $0.00 with membership. Click here to order it from Amazon.com.

The front cover of Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization by Bill McKibben. | The Unfolding Solar Energy Revolution — The front cover of Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization by Bill McKibben. Click on the image to go to the Amazon page for the hardback version of the book.

Amazon’s Description of the Book

From the acclaimed environmentalist, a call to harness the power of the sun and rewrite our scientific, economic, and political future.

Our climate, and our democracy, are melting down. But Bill McKibben, one of the first to sound the alarm about the climate crisis, insists the moment is also full of possibility. Energy from the sun and wind is suddenly the cheapest power on the planet and growing faster than any energy source in history―if we can keep accelerating the pace, we have a chance.

Here Comes the Sun tells the story of the sudden spike in power from the sun and wind―and the desperate fight of the fossil fuel industry and their politicians to hold this new power at bay. From the everyday citizens who installed solar panels equal to a third of Pakistan’s electric grid in a year to the world’s sixth-largest economy―California―nearly halving its use of natural gas in the last two years, Bill McKibben traces the arrival of plentiful, inexpensive solar energy. And he shows how solar power is more than just a path out of the climate crisis: it is a chance to reorder the world on saner and more humane grounds. You can’t hoard solar energy or hold it in reserves―it’s available to all.

There’s no guarantee we can make this change in time, but there is a hope―in McKibben’s eyes, our best hope for a new civilization: one that looks up to the sun, every day, as the star that fuels our world.

This is my five-star review for Here Comes the Sun

The Spectacular Success of Renewables

Here comes the sun tells the story of the spectacular success of renewables around the world, especially the success of solar power and wind power, with a special emphasis on solar power. The success of renewables was one reason that the IPCC will likely retire the RCP8.5 emissions scenario. The RCP8.5 emissions scenario, which was the extremely bad emissions scenario, was never very likely to begin with, but the fact that the world, including China, is turning away from coal and fossil fuels made this scenario implausible as they stated. I am not sure whether Bill McKibben could have predicted this when he wrote this book, but I think this recent event makes this book very relevant now in 2026.

The book describes a very interesting situation for our world and contains interesting personal anecdotes and is written in a positive and optimistic way. However, I was delighted that the book was full of interesting facts, for example, in 2024 92.5% of all new electricity bought online around the world came from renewables. Other facts are, Chinese emissions are dropping. He tells us that forty percent of the world’s ship traffic consists of moving coal and gas back and forth across the ocean to be burned. He states that the entire continent of Africa has barely produced 3% of the greenhouse gases warming the atmosphere, whilst they are likely to bear the brunt of the effects of global warming.

Other interesting facts are; Chinese citizens can expect to live on average 2.2 years longer than they would have a decade ago, due to the sharp drop in pollution (thanks to renewables and EVs). Dealing with cleantech waste is a small problem compared to fossil fuels, and we have enough minerals, especially considering recycling. He tells us about various physics facts related to the sun, how our health is effected by the sun, the history of the day “Sunday”, sun worship in the ancient world, and other sun related facts.

He reviews the history of fossil fuels and renewables, particularly solar power, and the how the fossil fuel industry and certain politicians are fighting against renewables with disinformation and bad faith arguments. He explains the problems with fossil fuels and the dangers they pose, which is not just limited to climate change. He also explains a little bit about why we know that fossil fuels are causing global warming / climate change, why we need to keep pushing for renewables despite their success. He states that because fossil fuels themselves are easy to concentrate, they often yield authoritarian outcomes.

In the past renewables were an expensive alternative and fossil fuels cheap, but that situation has been reversed. He explains why EVs are in general cleaner and better for the environment than cars with internal combustion engines. He explains how we get around the intermittence issue with wind and solar and that batteries are getting much cheaper and environmentally friendlier, and why a lot of negative information you hear about batteries is not true anymore. Salt batteries is an example of an emerging technology.

My only concern with the book is that Bill McKibben is not a scientist. He is an activist. Because of that it is extra important that he provides references to reputable sources for all his claims. Typically, scientists provide references to their claims even though you in general can trust scientists more than activists. However, Bill McKibben provided no references to any of his several hundred facts and claims, except for some general and vague information in the back about where he got his information from.

I should say that I fact checked about two dozen of his claims and found only one that was not entirely accurate, so overall I trust this book. The book is easy, lighthearted and positive reading. It is not a heavy science book, the book was well organized, and he is a good author. Therefore, I highly recommend this book.

The back cover of Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization by Bill McKibben. Click on the image to go to the Amazon page for the paperback version of the book.

A related super fact is “The Unfolding Clean Energy Revolution”

To see the Super Facts click here

Superfact 106: IPCC likely retiring the RCP8.5 emissions scenario does not mean that the IPCC backtracked on any climate science. It does not mean that climate change does not remain a serious and dangerous problem, and it definitely does not mean that global warming is not human caused.

The photo below was recently taken by the International Space Station proving once and for all that Earth is flat like a pancake. NASA issued a statement on Thursday stating that Earth being closely spherical in shape is a long standing hoax created by leftwing extremists.

The picture shows a disk representing a flat Earth. A world map is on top of it and the sun is in the background. | IPCC Did Not Backtrack on Global Warming Being Human Caused — Digital illustration of flat Earth. Shutterstock asset id: 797857906 by Amanda Carden

OK, that isn’t true. It sounds like an April 1^st joke, doesn’t it? It is a joke, except it isn’t April 1^st. However, a fairly recent survey showed that 10% of the US population believe Earth is flat, not roundish. Imagine you not understanding any of the evidence for Earth being round and imagine that you’ve never stood on a tall hill watching ships disappearing below the horizon and imagine you being surrounded by a lot of people who claim that Earth is flat. It would be easy for you to believe that Earth is flat like a pancake. Wouldn’t it? Trying to understand evidence and science is crucial to understanding the world.

When I was young, I was bamboozled into thinking Earth was 6,000 years old and that evolution was a hoax. Then I got a science education, and I had to abandon those beliefs. Later as a young adult, I was bamboozled again, this time by rightwing media, into thinking that global warming wasn’t happening, well at least not very much of it, but then I learned something about the related evidence and about climate science, and I had to abandon that misconception too.

When you do not know about or understand the evidence, you are easy to fool, and that includes you fooling yourself by misunderstanding articles you are reading. Science is not a well understood topic despite its high importance in today’s world. Conspiracy theories, anti-vaccine propaganda, creationism, anti-climate-science, and other anti-science is spreading fast today, and it is easy to get bamboozled. Anti-science has become a cultural phenomenon.

To us who understand a little bit of the evidence that we are causing climate change, the evidence is conclusive enough that claims that it isn’t us causing it, sound just like the flat Earth claim above. It sounds like an April 1^st joke to us because we know something. On the other hand, if you don’t know about the evidence, then you are easy to fool, and you might easily jump to false conclusions. Watch your biases and wishful thinking and pay attention to what the experts in the field are saying, not politicians, not influencers, not Facebook memes.

Examples of evidence that we humans are causing climate / global warming / climate disruption (pick your preferred moniker) include satellites having directly measured our greenhouse gases trapping heat, the upper troposphere cooling whilst the lower troposphere is warming, a phenomenon explained by greenhouse gas emissions, the unnatural speed of the warming, the manner in which the warming happens (explained only by greenhouse gas emissions), and that possible natural causes such as the sun, orbital cycles / Milankovitch cycles cannot explain the current warming. Add isotope studies that show that the added greenhouse gases originate from burning fossil fuels and that volcanoes emit less than 1% CO2 of what we emit.

IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) being likely to drop the so called RCP8.5 (or SSP5-8.5) scenario in the upcoming Seventh Assessment Report upon the suggestion of the Scenario Model Intercomparison Project has set off a flood of misinformation and misinterpretation. Not the least by politicians, notably our President, who made some very bizarre and clueless statements on the issue.

IPCC and the Scenario Model Intercomparison Project never stated that climate change is not caused by humans, or that climate change is not a serious problem. The Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) fundamentally depends on how much greenhouse gases we emit, as can be seen in the graph below. RCP8.5 corresponds to a very extreme scenario of burning enormous amount of coal. It was never a likely scenario to begin with, and it had become implausible due to the successful transitions to clean energy. That is why it makes sense to drop RCP8.5.

It was not because climate scientists were wrong about the climate science, or because environmentalists are exaggerating. In contrast to what many media outlets will tell you it is a vindication or victory for environmentalists. The global efforts to transition to clean energy have made it so that we can declare the worst of the worst scenario as implausible.

The graph shows four scenarios RCP2.6, RCP4.5, RCP6.0, RCP8.5, each corresponding to different concentrations of CO2. The Y-axis shows the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere going from 300 ppm to 1300 ppm. The X-axis corresponds to the years going from year 2000 to the year 2100. — Different RCP scenarios result in different predicted greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere (from 2000 to 2100). RCP8.5 would result in the highest greenhouse gas concentration (measured as CO2-equivalents). Efbrazil, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Since there are so much confusion, misinformation and hoopla surrounding this seemingly non-controversial event, I have reasons to consider the rectification of the misinformation a super-fact.

Official Statements on RCP8.5 by IPCC and the Scenario Model Intercomparison Project

It should also be noted that IPCC issues assessment reports based on research done by other organizations such as the Scenario Model Intercomparison Project. The IPCC does not conduct its own research. That is another common misrepresentation across media. It was not IPCC that decided to drop the RCP8.5 scenario, and the seventh assessment report has not yet been released. It was a suggestion by the Scenario Model Intercomparison Project published as a paper in Geoscientific Model Development, which stated “the CMIP6 high emission levels (quantified by SSP5-8.5) have become implausible, based on trends in the costs of renewables, the emergence of climate policy and recent emission trends”. You can read this paper here (and search for the quote).

Notice that the paper by the Scenario Model Intercomparison Project is NOT stating that global warming / climate change is not human caused. It does NOT state that it is not a serious problem. It does not in anyway imply anything like what the President and certain media outlets claim. There is additional reading from the Scenario Model Intercomparison Project here. You can read IPCC’s official comment on the issue here and its statement here. They were published May 20, 2026. The Washington Post and EOS provide some pretty accurate and easy to read explanations of what happened, for those wanting lighter reading.

Tag: RCP8.5

The Unfolding Solar Energy Revolution