A Vox article examines how RCP 8.5, the highest-emission climate scenario used by scientists, has dominated climate journalism narratives about worst-case warming outcomes, though the article appears incomplete in the provided summary.

You’ve probably never heard of the term “RCP 8.5” — the highest-emission scenario used by climate scientists to project the planet’s future. But if you’ve read about climate change, you’ve seen the numbers and nightmarish outcomes it produced: 4°C of warming by 2100, sometimes 5°C, sea level rising multiple feet, parts of the planet too hot for humans.
Those numbers shaped a decade and a half of climate journalism, including a lot of my own when I covered climate change at Time magazine. I didn’