Trump gloats after UN climate committee moves away from most extreme climate change scenario (Image: Getty Images)
President Donald Trump took a triumphant tone late on Saturday after scientists stepped back from the most catastrophic climate change projection, reclassifying it as “implausible.”
The United Nations-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) overhauled its modelling framework, abandoning the previous doomsday climate scenario of a 4.5 degrees Celsius rise above pre-industrial levels by 2100.
Those behind the revised global warming projections no longer consider the once-feared scenario to be credible. Trump wasted no time celebrating the development on social media, while simultaneously taking aim at Democratic climate policies.
“GOOD RIDDANCE! After 15 years of Dumocrats promising that “Climate Change” is going to destroy the Planet, the United Nations TOP Climate Committee just admitted that its own projections (RCP8.5) were WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!” Trump remarked on Truth Social.
The IPCC’s most extreme climate change scenario had previously forecast surging global temperatures, rising sea levels, widespread crop failures, melting glaciers and more, with certain climate scientists even raising concerns over potential extinction-level events.
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The scientists, whose findings were published in the journal Geoscientific Model Development, have now revised the high-emissions scenario to forecast 3.5 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100.
“For far too long Climate Activism has been used by Dumocrats to scare Americans, push horrible Energy Polices, and fund BILLIONS into their bogus research programs,” he continued. Trump concluded: “Unlike the Dumocrats, who use Climate Alarmism nonsense to push their GREEN NEW SCAM, my Administration will always be based on TRUTH, SCIENCE, and FACT! President DONALD J. TRUMP.”
Last September at the U.N. General Assembly in New York, Trump branded climate change a “con job.” He ranted: “All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong… They were made by stupid people that have cost their country’s fortunes and given those same countries no chance for success.”
Trump’s position on environmental policy is perhaps best encapsulated by his well-known slogan “Drill, Baby, Drill,” which has become synonymous with his ambitions to ramp up fossil fuel production while dismantling environmental protections and regulations.
Trump, known for his “Drill, Baby, Drill” slogan, has rolled back on environmental policies (Image: Getty Images)
On the very first day of his second term in office, Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement for the second time, declared a “national energy emergency,” and set about rolling back what he described as “ideologically motivated regulations.” His administration has also frozen and cut funding for vital scientific institutions across the country, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation.
Why has the most extreme climate scenario been revised?
Researchers behind the study concluded that the worst-case climate scenario has become “implausible, based on trends in the costs of renewables, the emergence of climate policy and recent emission trends.” According to the study, the high emission scenario “explores a future world that weakens or even abandons mitigation actions and policies – in combination with other development trends that could lead to high emissions.
“The scenario is based on trends that may not be the most likely (based on a current assessment), but that are still plausible,” the researchers wrote.
Such a scenario could become plausible should there be “deep political, technological, and structural deviation from current trends.”
In essence, a significant reversal of affordable renewable energy progress and worldwide policy efforts to tackle climate change could bring the most extreme climate scenario back into play. Despite the most alarming climate projections being ruled out, scientists continue to caution that the threat of climate change remains very real.
“The risks of climate change have not disappeared,” climate scientist and lead author of the study, Detlef Van Vuuren, told the Associated Press. “The good news is that we did not follow the most dramatic emission pathway. However, we are still heading towards a future with significant climate impacts; a future we should avoid.”