The United Nations has been regularly releasing apocalyptic reports for decades in an attempt to justify extreme cuts to our carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and a major overhaul to our modern way of life. Yet the most cited future forecast, the Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 (RCP8.5), is fundamentally flawed. This is one of the scenarios (along with SSP5-8.5 and SSP3-7.0) of greenhouse gas emissions that have been used to create dire forecasts and as a baseline in climate change researc