The Other “They Knew” Climate Story: #ExxonKnew vs. #TheyKnew

While everyone was chanting #ExxonKnew, another “they knew” story was unfolding in plain sight.

For more than a decade, we’ve been inundated with a carefully crafted public relations campaign built around a simple slogan:

#ExxonKnew.

The accusation is familiar. Exxon supposedly understood the risks of anthropogenic climate change decades ago, concealed what it knew, and therefore bears responsibility for today’s climate damages. That slogan has become the centerpiece of lawsuits, congressional hearings, documentaries, activist campaigns, and an endless stream of social media posts.

Whether those lawsuits ultimately succeed isn’t the point of this article. There’s another “they knew” story that deserves at least as much public attention. Unlike #ExxonKnew, this story doesn’t depend on leaked corporate memos, investigative reporting, or speculation about what executives believed behind closed doors.

Everything happened in public. The papers were published. The warnings were issued. The institutions kept going anyway. And WUWT documented it as it happened.

Theer’s a New Website Collecting the Receipts

A newly launched project called The RCP8.5 Record – They Knew It Was Wrong. They Used It Anyway assembles the public record surrounding the rise—and quiet fall—of climate science’s most infamous emissions scenario.

Its central argument is straightforward. Beginning nearly a decade ago, researchers increasingly recognized that RCP8.5 no longer represented a plausible “business as usual” future. Its assumptions about coal consumption, technological development, population growth, and future emissions had drifted steadily away from observable trends.

By 2020, that conclusion had been published in Nature. Yet RCP8.5 continued appearing in government reports, climate lawsuits, financial risk assessments, educational materials, ESG analyses, and thousands of scientific papers for years afterward.

If you’ve been reading WUWT, none of that should sound remotely surprising.

WUWT Was Covering This Before It Was Fashionable

One of the advantages of publishing every day for nearly twenty years is that the archive speaks for itself. When the retirement of SSP5-8.5 became official earlier this year, we explained why it mattered in:

RIP Doomsday Model RCP8.5 – A Quiet but Profound Shift in Climate Science

There we noted that an emissions scenario originally designed as an extreme stress test had somehow become the media’s favorite description of “business as usual.”

That transformation didn’t happen because emissions suddenly began tracking RCP8.5. It happened because the scenario produced the biggest headlines. We followed that with:

A Generation of Kids Thinks They Have No Future. Science Just Admitted Why

That article examined what happens when an implausible worst-case scenario escapes the confines of model intercomparison exercises and becomes embedded in journalism, classrooms, documentaries, and popular culture.

Climate anxiety didn’t appear spontaneously; It was cultivated.

Finally, Willis Eschenbach looked at the institutional inertia surrounding the scenario in:

RCP 8.5: When the Spherical Cows Escape the Barn

By then the question was no longer whether RCP8.5 remained realistic. The question was why so many institutions continued behaving as though it was.

The Timeline Is Difficult to Ignore One of the strengths of The RCP8.5 Record is that it assembles the chronology in one place. Consider the progression.

• 2011 RCP8.5 Adopted by the IPCC. The IPCC finalizes four climate scenarios. RCP8.5 was designed as an extreme outlier
• 2017 Researchers Justin Ritchie and Hadi Dowlatabadi demonstrated that RCP8.5 depended upon coal consumption exceeding what many geologists believed could realistically be mined. That should have been a warning.
• 2020 Zeke Hausfather and Glen Peters published their widely cited paper in Nature explaining why RCP8.5 should no longer be described as “business as usual.”
• That wasn’t coming from skeptics. It was coming from respected climate scientists.
• 2021 Roger Pielke Jr. and Justin Ritchie described the continued misuse of RCP8.5 as one of the century’s major failures of scientific integrity.
• 2022 EPA’s draft Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases review quietly stopped using SSP5-8.5 after determining that it lay outside the agency’s plausible range of future emissions. Another institutional acknowledgement.

And yet…

• The RCP 8.5 scenario continued appearing in the Fifth National Climate Assessment.
• It continued underpinning climate litigation.
• It continued informing central bank stress tests.
• It continued driving ESG analyses.
• It continued appearing in thousands of peer-reviewed papers.

Only in 2026 did the ScenarioMIP committee officially retire SSP5-8.5 from the framework supporting CMIP7.

That sequence is difficult to reconcile with the claim that “nobody understood the problem.” That’s as weak as the weasel-word “implausible” they used to go with the announcement.

This isn’t about climate models; it’s about a narrative.

Let’s be clear about something that critics routinely misunderstand; nobody objects to scientists exploring extreme possibilities. Modelers should investigate unlikely futures, engineers do this all the time.

The problem begins when an exploratory stress test quietly becomes the future presented to policymakers, journalists, educators, and the public. Somehow, “Here’s an extreme sensitivity experiment” became the “This is where we’re headed” De facto standard.

That distinction matters, because public perception drives public policy.

The Costs Were Real

The website lists some of the consequences.

• More than 140 central banks used scenarios based on SSP5-8.5 for financial stress testing.
• Climate litigation relied on projections derived from it.
• Educational curricula incorporated it.

By the website’s count, more than 17,000 academic papers continued using RCP8.5 after its shortcomings had become widely recognized.

Whether readers agree with every number isn’t really the point. The larger question is whether institutions had an obligation to distinguish between an extreme modeling exercise and the future they expected to occur.

The Dog That Didn’t Bark

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the story isn’t that RCP8.5 was retired. Scientific understanding evolves, scenarios are revised. That’s normal.

The remarkable part is the silence from science at large and the climate compliant media.

When RCP8.5 dominated headlines, we were told civilization faced an existential emergency. When the scientific community quietly concluded that its most famous emissions pathway no longer represented a plausible future…

…there were remarkably few headlines. Very few editorials. Almost no retrospectives. No blame placed for the media scaring a whole generation of children into thinking they had no future due to highly inflated climate change scenarios turned into doomsday stories. Certainly, no widespread acknowledgement that one of the principal engines of climate alarm had quietly exited the stage.

Imagine if the reverse had happened. Imagine if new evidence suggested emissions were tracking above RCP8.5. Would the media have ignored that story? Of course not. It would be front page news with labels like doom and apocalypse attached.

The Other “They Knew”

For years we’ve heard one refrain, started by Bill McKibben of the now essentially defunct 350.org and his band of merry collaborators who met in secret to form the campaign.

That “secret meeting” and “Exxon knew” refer to a pivotal 2012 gathering in La Jolla, California, where climate activists and researchers mapped out legal and public relations strategies against fossil fuel companies. This meeting laid the groundwork for the #ExxonKnew campaign, which erupted in 2015 when investigative journalists exposed that Exxon’s own scientists understood the realities of climate change as early as the 1970s.

#ExxonKnew was born.

Perhaps it’s time for a different set of questions.

• Who knew RCP8.5 was no longer a plausible baseline?
• Who continued using it?
• Who built regulations upon it?
• Who based lawsuits upon it?
• Who taught it in classrooms?
• Who cited it in thousands of scientific papers?

Unlike #ExxonKnew, this isn’t about trying to reconstruct what executives may have believed fifty years ago. The chronology surrounding RCP8.5 is documented in the open literature. The warnings were published. The papers were peer-reviewed. The institutions had every opportunity to adjust course. Many chose not to. The chronology is public, the papers are public, and the decisions are public.

And now, thanks to The RCP8.5 Record, the receipts are in one place.

We Told You So

WUWT readers have watched this story unfold in real time.

• We questioned the coal assumptions.
• We questioned calling RCP8.5 “business as usual.”
• We questioned building public policy around an increasingly implausible scenario.

None of those questions required a crystal ball, only a willingness to read the literature and compare it with the headlines. Now that SSP5-8.5 has been quietly retired, perhaps the most appropriate response isn’t triumph; It’s accountability.

With the help of Climate Litigation Watch, wecalled out Bill McKibben on it in #ExxonKnew – Something Wicked This Way Comes.

The public deserves to know how an exploratory worst-case scenario came to dominate climate journalism, public policy, investment strategy, litigation, and education long after respected researchers had begun publicly questioning its realism.

That story deserves every bit as much attention as the one told under the banner of #ExxonKnew.

Because this time, everyone can read the record for themselves. And for WUWT readers, there is one final observation.

We’ve been telling this story for years, only people with open minds listened.