“GOOD RIDDANCE!” President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social on Saturday, after scientists moved away from one of the most extreme global warming scenarios used in United Nations-backed climate modeling.
His post went on to say the U.N.’s “TOP Climate Committee just admitted that its own projections (RCP8.5) were WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!” He accused Democrats of using climate fears to justify energy policies and government spending, and said his own administration would rest on “TRUTH, SCIENCE, and FACT.”
What changed
The scenario at issue is RCP8.5, later carried forward as SSP5-8.5. It imagined severe warming under extremely high emissions. The worst-case outcomes the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change associated with it included large temperature and sea level increases, global crop failures and even extinction events on the scale of the dinosaurs.
GB News reported that the scenario is being phased out because researchers no longer consider it the most plausible path. They pointed to the growth of renewable energy, emissions trends and climate policy.
Researchers writing in the journal Geoscientific Model Development said future scenarios should still span a wide range, from severe warming to low-emissions futures. They also gave their reasoning for the high end: “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.”
For the 21st century, they wrote, the range of outcomes will be smaller than assessed before.
Trump’s earlier line
The post followed remarks Trump made last September at the U.N. General Assembly in New York, where he called climate change a “con job.” He said then: “It’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion.” Of the predictions made by the United Nations and others, he said they “were made by stupid people that have cost their country’s fortunes.”
Democrats pushed back. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York, called his comments “total disinformation” and said the claim that climate change is a hoax is “just not true, and yet being propagated.”
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin later backed the president in an interview with Fox News. “The president is absolutely right,” he said, adding that left-wing policies pursued in the name of climate change risk extreme economic pain.
Sources
- Trump celebrates after UN climate committee moves away from its most extreme global warming scenario
