rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/rcp85-is-officially-dead?r=f96qu&utm_campaign=post&...
1 correction found
The Network for Greening the Financial System framework, used by more than 140 central banks, has utilized a “Hot House World” scenario calibrated to RCP8.5 physical risk into the bank stress tests run by the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, the Banque de France, and the US Federal Reserve.
This sentence overstates NGFS membership and misstates what the U.S. Federal Reserve used. NGFS says its members are a mix of central banks and prudential supervisors, and the Fed says its 2023 pilot exercise used NGFS ‘Current Policies’ and ‘Net Zero 2050’ plus Fed-defined physical-risk shocks—not an NGFS ‘Hot House World’ scenario.
Full reasoning
Two parts of this sentence conflict with the cited institutions’ own descriptions.
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NGFS is not ‘more than 140 central banks’.
The official NGFS membership page says that, as of 26 August 2026, the NGFS had 152 members, but it explicitly defines members as “central banks or prudential supervisory authorities”. The member list includes many non-central-bank supervisors (for example APRA, New York DFS, EBA, ESMA, FINMA, ACPR, and others). So the article’s wording incorrectly turns a mixed membership of central banks and supervisors into “more than 140 central banks.” -
The Federal Reserve did not use an NGFS ‘Hot House World’ scenario in its pilot climate exercise.
In the Federal Reserve’s own overview of the 2023 Pilot Climate Scenario Analysis, Table 2 says the transition-risk module used NGFS “Current Policies” and “Net Zero 2050”. The same page says the physical-risk module used hazards specified by the Federal Reserve itself using selected SSP/RCP conditions and return-period losses. That contradicts the claim that the Fed’s stress test used an NGFS “Hot House World” scenario calibrated to RCP8.5 physical risk.
Because the sentence makes both of these points as matters of fact, and both are contradicted by the relevant official sources, it is inaccurate.
2 sources
- Membership | Network for Greening the Financial System
As of 26 August 2026, the NGFS consists of 152 members across over 95 countries... Members are central banks or prudential supervisory authorities... [the list includes many supervisory authorities as well as central banks].
- The Fed - Overview of the Pilot CSA Exercise
Table 2 ... Transition risk module: Scenarios — NGFS: Current Policies and Net Zero 2050 ... The physical risk module ... The Federal Reserve set broad parameters around the severity of physical hazards by selecting a future point in time on specific Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) or Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs).