United Nations advisory panel junked worst-case emissions scenario

See Donald Trump, Climate Scientist: How a presidential tweet forced the media to come to terms with its faulty global-warming reporting by Holman W. Jenkins. Excerpts:

"an authoritative United Nations advisory panel quietly junked a long-misused worst-case emissions scenario known as RCP 8.5, one of the first to notice was the president"

"Piling up worst-case assumptions, including RCP 8.5, the report (from the U.S. government in 2018) showed warming nevertheless to be an affordable burden for Americans, who would be three or four times as rich by 2090 despite an adverse climate." 

"Reporters . . . ignored the numbers and filled their dispatches with adjectives indicating a doom that, hilariously, the study didn’t support."

"the New York Times [is] . . . now admitting that “news stories [i.e., its own] about climate research often emphasized results based on RCP 8.5 as a picture of what the world can expect unless countries slash their emissions, which isn’t right.”"

"Only later was a back story of justification added. In a RCP 8.5 world, all technological progress in the energy field would end. That is, with a strange exception: The technology to allow the world to quintuple its coal consumption, such as burning coal in cars."

"the world consumes more of every kind of energy, even renewables, without necessarily having any deliberate effect on emissions, though those emissions remain far below the RCP 8.5 forecast"