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HAS, I researched how the IPCC named RCP8.5 their “Business as Usual” (BAU) case. As you point out, they didn’t use the term in AR5, instead they began to use the term during press conferences and presentation of AR5 contents in late 2013 and early 2014. The BAU term became the standard they used in interviews and discussions, this was picked up by the media, and almost immediately we began to see papers referring to RCP8.5 as BAU.
This extended to training material used in universities, and to position statements written by scientific organizations in numerous countries. By 2015 almost all climate change papers referred to RCP8.5 as BAU, and this was also picked up by US government agencies during the Obama administration.
The period 2013 to 2018 saw a significant number of comments, articles and papers explaining RCP8.5 wasn’t BAU. I myself saturated the comments sections in newspapers and blogs with repetitive remarks about this error. In my case I came to conclude RCP8.5 wasn't BAU because of tendencies we observed: fossil fuel resources were increasingly more difficult to extract, competing technology prices were dropping, and the assumptions in RCP8.5 didn’t make sense (I’m not going to get into it here, but do remember the RCPs were scenarios prepared to meet an arbitrary IPCC request: they wanted four cases with four forcings, and the team preparing RCP8.5 had to include absurd system behavior to reach the 8.5 watts per m2).
We can’t blame the RCP8.5 authors because they were asked to deliver the target forcing. But I think a case can be made to accuse IPCC principals of scientific fraud for: 1. using the BAU term for RCP8.5 on a consistent basis, and 2. Failing to inform the scientific community and decision makers that RCP8.5 wasn’t really BAU.
I think we can also consider the ongoing (but increasingly feeble) defense of RCP8.5 as BAU without a corresponding correction by the IPCC as a sign that it can be considered a political organization with clear political goals, no regard for the quality of its products or their adequate use by the scientific community, and lacking in ethics to such an extent that it deserves to be shut down and replaced by a new organization outside of the UN structure.
The problems we see with the RCP8.5 use are a symptom of a very serious disease which has pervaded this field for decades, a disease which is now entering the realm of criminal behavior, because fake science is used to justify trillions of dollars in spending which are going to bring hefty profits to certain actors, and give geopolitical advantages to nations such as China and Russia (because they aren’t about to commit economic suicide cutting CO2 emissions to zero).
Criminal behavior can also be seen in the use of exaggerated alarmism to scare children, and put teenagers on the street asking for political changes (which conveniently demand the end of capitalism and parrot Neomarxist lines about climate justice, the white patriarchate, and etc).
Scaring and traumatizing children using false information is a criminal act, and such abuse ought to stop. But we already know that radical political movements will stop at nothing, and unfortunately the climate change problem is now a weapon used by Neomarxist radicals as a means to take over.
And when we combine the economic harm they will cause with their repressive and social engineering methods, we may be about to see the West fall in the hands of a political faction which may eventually rival Stalin, Mao, Castro, and Chavez when it comes to its innate evil nature.