Trump called it “GOOD RIDDANCE.” The occasion was a shift among climate scientists, who have stepped back from one of the harshest emissions scenarios built into United Nations-backed climate modeling.
The president posted on Truth Social on Saturday that after 15 years of Democrats warning “Climate Change” would destroy the planet, the U.N.’s top climate committee had “just admitted that its own projections (RCP8.5) were WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!”
He continued with a longer attack. Climate activism, he wrote, had been used “to scare Americans, push horrible Energy Polices, and fund BILLIONS into their bogus research programs.” He said his administration, unlike the Democrats’ “GREEN NEW SCAM,” would always rest on “TRUTH, SCIENCE, and FACT!”
The scenario in question
RCP8.5, later renamed SSP5-8.5, was the top of the range under the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It pictured severe warming with emissions running extremely high. Outcomes the IPCC tied to its worst cases included large rises in temperature and sea level, global crop failures and extinction events on the scale that ended the dinosaurs.
Climate Depot summarized the finding this way: researchers concluded the worst-case path no longer reflects the most plausible trajectory. GB News reported that the scenario is being phased out for that reason, citing growth in renewable energy, emissions trends and climate policies.
Researchers writing in the journal Geoscientific Model Development said future scenarios should keep spanning a wide range, from severe warming to lower-emissions futures. They added: “For the 21st century, this range will be smaller than assessed before: on the high-end of the range, 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.”
Earlier remarks and responses
Trump’s post followed his speech last September at the U.N. General Assembly in New York, where he called climate change a “con job.” He said then that “All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong.”
Hillary Clinton, the former Secretary of State, called those remarks “total disinformation” at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York. Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator, defended the president in an interview with Fox News: “The president is absolutely right,” he said.
Sources
- Trump celebrates after UN climate committee moves away from its most extreme global warming scenario
- Trump celebrates after UN climate committee moves away from its most extreme global warming scenario
