The DOI matches its Crossref record; 15 of the 15 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
RCP8.5 tracks cumulative CO 2 emissions
Open accessAbstract
Climate simulation-based scenarios are routinely used to characterize a range of plausible climate futures. Despite some recent progress on bending the emissions curve, RCP8.5, the most aggressive scenario in assumed fossil fuel use for global climate models, will continue to serve as a useful tool for quantifying physical climate risk, especially over near- to midterm policy-relevant time horizons. Not only are the emissions consistent with RCP8.5 in close agreement with historical total cumulative CO 2 emissions (within 1%), but RCP8.5 is also the best match out to midcentury under current and stated policies with still highly plausible levels of CO 2 emissions in 2100.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
The representative concentration pathways: an overview
van Vuuren, D. P., Edmonds, J., Kainuma, M., Riahi, K., Thomson, A., Hibbard, K., Hurtt, G. C., Kram, T., Krey, V., Lamarque, J.-F., et al. (2011) · Climatic Change · doi:10.1007/s10584-011-0148-z · Cited by 7,741
Thring, M. W. (1977) · Electronics and Power · doi:10.1049/ep.1977.0180 · Cited by 7,338
RCP 8.5—A scenario of comparatively high greenhouse gas emissions
Riahi, K., Rao, S., Krey, V., Cho, C., Chirkov, V., Fischer, G., Kindermann, G., Nakicenovic, N., & Rafaj, P. (2011) · Climatic Change · doi:10.1007/s10584-011-0149-y · Cited by 2,791
Temporary reduction in daily global CO2 emissions during the covid-19 forced confinement
Le Quéré, C., Jackson, R. B., Jones, M. W., Smith, A. J. P., Abernethy, S., Andrew, R. M., De-Gol, A. J., Willis, D. R., Shan, Y., Canadell, J. G., et al. (2020) · Nature Climate Change · doi:10.1038/s41558-020-0797-x · Cited by 2,258
Friedlingstein, P., Jones, M. W., O'Sullivan, M., Andrew, R. M., Hauck, J., Peters, G. P., Peters, W., Pongratz, J., Sitch, S., Le Quéré, C., et al. (2019) · Earth System Science Data · doi:10.5194/essd-11-1783-2019 · Cited by 1,657
Emissions – the ‘business as usual’ story is misleading
Hausfather, Z., & Peters, G. P. (2020) · Nature · doi:10.1038/d41586-020-00177-3 · Cited by 1,213
Climate Science Special Report: Fourth National Climate Assessment, Volume I
(2017) · doi:10.7930/j0j964j6 · Cited by 1,190
The challenge to keep global warming below 2 °C
Peters, G. P., Andrew, R. M., Boden, T., Canadell, J. G., Ciais, P., Le Quéré, C., Marland, G., Raupach, M. R., & Wilson, C. (2013) · Nature Climate Change · doi:10.1038/nclimate1783 · Cited by 959
Estimating and tracking the remaining carbon budget for stringent climate targets
Rogelj, J., Forster, P. M., Kriegler, E., Smith, C. J., & Séférian, R. (2019) · Nature · doi:10.1038/s41586-019-1368-z · Cited by 418
International Energy Agency (2019) · World Energy Outlook · doi:10.1787/caf32f3b-en · Cited by 249
Cited by
Comprehensive evidence implies a higher social cost of CO2
Rennert, K., Errickson, F., Prest, B. C., Rennels, L., Newell, R. G., Pizer, W., Kingdon, C., Wingenroth, J., Cooke, R., Parthum, B., et al. (2022) · Nature · doi:10.1038/s41586-022-05224-9 · Cited by 1,067
Liu, K., Harrison, M. T., Yan, H., Liu, D. L., Meinke, H., Hoogenboom, G., Wang, B., Peng, B., Guan, K., Jaegermeyr, J., et al. (2023) · Nature Communications · doi:10.1038/s41467-023-36129-4 · Cited by 252
The global potential for increased storage of carbon on land
Walker, W. S., Gorelik, S. R., Cook-Patton, S. C., Baccini, A., Farina, M. K., Solvik, K. K., Ellis, P. W., Sanderman, J., Houghton, R. A., Leavitt, S. M., et al. (2022) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.2111312119 · Cited by 237
Self-citationProlonged Siberian heat of 2020 almost impossible without human influence
Ciavarella, A., Cotterill, D., Stott, P., Kew, S., Philip, S., van Oldenborgh, G. J., Skålevåg, A., Lorenz, P., Robin, Y., Otto, F., et al. (2021) · Climatic Change · doi:10.1007/s10584-021-03052-w · Cited by 172
Artificial intelligence and climate change: ethical issues
Nordgren, A. (2023) · Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society · doi:10.1108/jices-11-2021-0106 · Cited by 94
Metadata
- Authors
- Schwalm, C. R., Glendon, S., & Duffy, P. B.
- Venue
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Published
- 2020-08-03
- Volume
- 117
- Issue
- 33
- Pages
- 19656-19657
- ISSN
- 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
- 1091-6490
- OpenAlex
- W3047039899
- Cited by
- 804
- References
- 15
- FWCI
- 108.27
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: RCP8.5 tracks cumulative CO 2 emissions. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1073/pnas.2007117117
- The paper
- Schwalm, C. R., Glendon, S., & Duffy, P. B. (2020). RCP8.5 tracks cumulative CO 2 emissions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2007117117
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.