President Donald Trump mocked climate alarmists on Saturday after another one of their doomsday scenarios was shown to be utter nonsense.
The admission by scientists that prompted Trump’s derision is but the latest in a long series of embarrassments for those activists keen to use climate prophecies as an excuse to socially engineer human beings and regulate society.
Narrative collapse
The imagined threat of anthropogenic climate change has driven numerous public officials, scientists, and impressionable people bonkers in recent decades.
While Western politicians sacrificed energy security and hobbled industry in hopes of slowing natural phenomena and defeating the arch-villain carbon dioxide (plant food), similarly minded scientists proposed blotting out the sun; “culling” the emission-generating human population with a deadly pandemic; reducing or eliminating meat consumption; putting the population on a diet of bugs, weeds, and micro-algae; and having fewer children.
‘Climate Activism has been used by Dumocrats to scare Americans, push horrible Energy Polices, and fund BILLIONS into their bogus research programs.’
This madness has been driven and exacerbated in large part by bogus claims and laughably wrong predictions. In most cases, all that’s required to debunk such claims is time and a functional set of eyes.
Failed Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore, for instance, said at the Copenhagen Climate Conference in 2009 that new research indicated there was “a 75% chance that the entire North Polar ice cap during some of the summer months could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years.”
Just as Gore was wrong about a 20-foot rise in the global sea level “in the near future,” polar bear drownings, and the snows of Kilimanjaro, he was wrong about the future of Arctic ice.
A paper published late last year in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters concluded that over the past 20 years, “Arctic sea ice loss has slowed considerably, with no statistically significant decline in September sea ice area since 2005.”
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Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis/Getty Images
If, perhaps, Gore confused the Arctic with the Antarctic, he’d still be wrong. Antarctica has enjoyed a massive gain in ice mass — at a rate of 119 billion tons per year from 2021 to 2023.
Polar ice is hardly the only planetary feature alarmists mistakenly suggested would fall victim to climate change.
Alarmists suggested in a 2017 study and elsewhere that climate change posed an existential threat to the world’s coral reefs and that “immediate global action to curb future warming is essential to secure a future for coral reefs.”
While dutifully claiming that “climate change mitigation” was still essential, researchers admitted in 2024 that “widespread and diverse coral species all exhibit the potential to adapt to the changing climate.”
Former Jeffrey Epstein associate Bill Gates is one of the few alarmists to admit to having pie on his face.
Gates alleged in a 2021 work of climate alarmist agitprop that if humanity failed to eliminate so-called greenhouse gas emissions, “climate change will keep getting worse, and the impact on humans will in all likelihood be catastrophic.”
After years of fear-mongering, he apparently felt compelled to admit that he too had gotten it wrong.
Gates noted in October that the “doomsday view of climate change” that says “cataclysmic climate change will decimate civilization” and that “nothing matters more than limiting the rise in temperature” is wrong.
UN wrong, again
The United Nations, like Gates a longtime proponent of climate hysteria, was recently confronted with evidence that it too is wrong.
The Scenario Model Intercomparison Project, an outfit led by a committee of top climate scientists, admitted in a study published last month in the journal Geoscientific Model Development that the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s worst-case future emissions scenarios are “implausible based on trends in the costs of renewables, the emergence of climate policy and recent emission trends.”
Taking into account the world’s future population, emission trends, energy sources, climate policies, and other factors, researchers have cooked up various climate scenarios for use in scientific modeling and activist propaganda.
In the early 2010s, such researchers developed a set of four scenarios for climate modeling, called “representative concentration pathways” or RCPs. The most extreme of these was RCP8.5.
The number 8.5 here signals the level of radiative forcing — the extra heat supposedly trapped in the Earth’s system, expressed in watts per square meter — projected by the year 2100.
The IPCC projected in 2013 that under this scenario, there would be a temperature rise of 4.3°C by 2081-2100 when compared to the pre-industrial period.
Government of Canada
RCP8.5’s successor, “shared socioeconomic pathway”-8.5, projected warming of 4.4°C by 2081-2100, with a “very likely” range of 3.3°C to 5.7°C, the Carbon Brief reported.
It was all nonsense.
Roger Pielke Jr., a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, noted, “The four scenarios were never apples-to-apples. They were four different fruits from four different trees. Yet, over more than a decade and in tens of thousands of papers, RCP8.5 was treated as where the world was headed and the other three scenarios — but especially RCP4.5 and 2.6 — as a world with climate policy interventions.”
Despite numerous scientists stressing that the alarmist scenario was not only unlikely but misleading, the RCP8.5 scenario “came to dominate the literature to a degree that is impossible to overstate,” Pielke said.
“RCP8.5 accounted for more than half of all RCP references in the 2018 U.S. Fourth National Climate Assessment, nearly 60 percent in the IPCC’s Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere, and about a third of all RCP references in the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report,” Pielke wrote. “By early 2020, researchers were publishing studies invoking RCP8.5 at a rate of roughly 20 per day. So far in 2026, studies using RCP8.5 (or its even more extreme successor, SSP5-8.5) are being published at a rate of ~30 new studies per day.”
Now, the scientific community must contend with the acknowledgment that this scenario is bogus.
Science journalist Maarten Keulemans noted in a post that has been translated from its original Dutch, “The IPCC acknowledges what has been circulating for a long time: The highest disaster scenario, 8.5, no longer aligns with reality. WHAT CONSEQUENCES this has. ALMOST EVERYTHING YOU READ ABOUT CLIMATE FUTURE IS WRONG.”
Keuleman suggested further that this admission effectively torpedoes claims that global surface temperature will increase 4-5°C by 2100; summers will all hit 104°F and agriculture in Western Europe will be unsustainable by century’s end; tuna, swordfish, and other marine creatures will go extinct; there will be millions of climate refugees every year; and that there will be no more Winter Olympics by 2040.
Trump similarly weighed in, stating, “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!”
“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,” the president continued. “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!”
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Bill gates, Carbon, Climate, Climate change, Climate hysteria, Emissions, Global warming, Greenhouse gas emissions, Population control, President donald trump, Science, Scientists, United nations, Climate activism, Politics
