After climate scientists quietly retired one of their worst-case emissions models — not because the planet stopped warming, but because clean energy adoption made the scenario’s assumptions outdated — Donald Trump took to Truth Social to declare victory over science.
“GOOD RIDDANCE!” Trump screamed into the void in all caps, informing his followers that the United Nations had just admitted its climate projections were “WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!”
He then promised that his administration “will always be based on TRUTH, SCIENCE, and FACT!” And you can believe him, because the words were, uh, in all caps.
So, it turns out that the man who spent the better part of a decade calling climate scientists frauds and liars will defer to them the moment they produce something he can misquote.
What actually happened is considerably less dramatic and considerably more embarrassing. The international committee responsible for feeding climate scenarios into IPCC modeling published a next-generation framework that retired the most extreme emissions pathway, known as RCP8.5 — a worst-case model that assumed, among other things, a near-fivefold expansion of global coal use through 2100 and a global population approaching 13 billion.
As actual renewable energy costs dropped and global emissions tracked lower than the scenario’s runaway assumptions, scientists updated their models accordingly. That is, by definition, how science is supposed to work. It is not, by any definition, a confession that climate change is fake.
So, the very crucial detail Trump is omitting — as he always does, as he always lies — is what the replacement models project. According to the estimates, the new HIGH scenario in the replacement CMIP7 framework still projects roughly 3°C of warming by 2100. Three degrees Celsius, or in plain English, our planet is still getting hotter, and catastrophically so
Scientists simply looked at the worst-case scenario and concluded it was too pessimistic based on new developments. They then updated their framework, and that framework still projects human catastrophe.
Trump read the headline, skipped the rest, and truly thought that the new report vindicated his anti-science, head-in-the-sand outlook.
It’s worth reiterating that the scientists who developed and retired RCP8.5 are the same community Trump and his MAGA cronies have spent years denouncing as radical alarmists running a political con. At this point, they really need to make up their minds about who we can trust when it comes to the climate.
The scientists are frauds until they do something he likes, at which point they are the “United Nations TOP Climate Committee” whose word is apparently gospel.
