Researchers publishing in Geoscientific Model Development have judged that the highest-emission path used in U.N.-backed climate modeling is no longer believable. In their words, “the high emission levels (quantified by SSP5-8.5) have become implausible, based on trends in the costs of renewables, the emergence of climate policy and recent emission trends.”
That scenario began life as RCP8.5 and was later labeled SSP5-8.5. It sat under the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as its most extreme case, with sharp temperature and sea level rises, global crop failures and even dinosaur-scale extinction events among the outcomes tied to it.
GB News reported that the scenario is being phased out. Researchers concluded it no longer matches the most likely trajectory given the spread of renewable energy, current emissions trends and climate policies.
Future scenarios, the authors wrote, should keep covering a broad spread of outcomes, from severe warming to low-emissions futures. The 21st-century range, they added, will be smaller than assessed before.
Trump claims a win
President Donald Trump seized on the shift on Saturday. “GOOD RIDDANCE!” he wrote on Truth Social, claiming the U.N.’s climate committee had “admitted that its own projections (RCP8.5) were WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!” after 15 years of Democratic warnings.
He accused Democrats of scaring Americans, pushing “horrible Energy Polices” and sending billions to “bogus research programs.” His administration, he said, would stay grounded in “TRUTH, SCIENCE, and FACT.”
The post echoed a speech he gave last September at the U.N. General Assembly in New York. There he described climate change as a “con job” and said predictions from the United Nations and others “were wrong.”
Reaction
Hillary Clinton, the former Secretary of State, answered those September remarks at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York. Trump had called climate change a hoax, she said, “because it’s just total disinformation.”
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin took the president’s side in a Fox News interview. Policies justified by climate change, he said, have been “willing to cause extreme economic pain.”
Sources
- Trump celebrates after UN climate committee moves away from its most extreme global warming scenario
