“Good riddance,” Trump declared in response to the admission that the scenario used by the UN’s IPCC to model future climate change was “implausible.”

The Heartland Institute reacts to President Donald Trump’s remark.

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Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 (“RCP 8.5”) is a high-emissions climate scenario used by the United Nations’ (“UN’s”) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (“IPCC”) to model future climate change.  It was formally adopted in the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) in 2014.

RCP 8.5 has been used by corporate media for years to push unfounded claims of catastrophic global warming due to “emissions” from human activity.  However, a recent study has concluded that RCP 8.5’s scenario is “implausible.”  The study is notable because it is being used to establish the new scenario framework for the upcoming IPCC Seventh Assessment Report due in 2029.

That RCP 8.5 was b*ll*cks has been known for a long time.  But, despite this being pointed out by many – including by believers in anthropogenic climate change alarmism – the misinformation and disinformation propagated by corporate media and others continued.

On hearing the “implausible” admission, US President Donald Trump said, “Good riddance!”  A comment which corporate media and “fact checkers” have been busy debunking and demonising him for.  In the following, The Heartland Institute gives its reaction to President Trump’s remark.

Heartland Institute Experts React to President Trump’s Social Media Post About UN Retreating from Extremist Climate Models

By The Heartland Institute, as published by Climate Realism on 26 May 2026

Climate Realism Editors’ Note: Multiple mainstream corporate media outlets, such as The Washington Post, Bloomberg, Fox News, among others, have reported on the retirement of the worst-case emissions scenario, Representative Concentration Pathway (“RCP”) 8.5, from the UN’s climate committee analyses and President Trump’s reaction to it. This is a great victory for Climate Realism, as realists like those writing here have long explained that RCP 8.5 is unrealistic, likely impossible, and used exclusively to generate terrifying headlines. It will not be missed.

SCHAUMBURG, IL (19 May 2026) – President Trump last weekend on Truth Social said “good riddance” to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (“IPCC”) most alarmist climate model called RCP 8.5.

Trump wrote: “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.”

For years, the IPCC has relied heavily on a global warming scenario that assumed energy absorption in the atmosphere would reach 8.5 watts per square meter by 2100. This worst-case scenario has been used in countless academic papers and the media to predict a climate catastrophe soon if the use of fossil fuels is not dramatically reduced. The IPCC announced in April that this outcome has become “implausible.”

The following statements from environment and climate experts at The Heartland Institute – a free-market think tank – may be used for attribution. For more comments, refer to the contact information below. To book a Heartland guest on your programme, please contact Executive Vice President and Director of Communications Jim Lakely at me***@*******nd.org or call/text 312-731-9364.

“President Trump is RIGHT, RIGHT, RIGHT! RCP 8.5 is and always has been a scam. We at Heartland have long critiqued RCP 8.5, noting it was implausible if not impossible, yet academics kept using it in hundreds of supposedly peer-reviewed studies. They used it because it produced alarming results that they and the climate activists then used to demand both more money, for research, and an end to fossil fuel use.

“Now what Heartland has said all along has been confirmed. RCP 8.5 has been withdrawn by the IPCC, citing the very reasons we’ve touted for more than a decade. Those hundreds of papers pushing false alarmism should be rescinded with prejudice.

“It’s time to base policy on real science and data, not computer-generated end-of-the-world scenarios.”

H. Sterling Burnett, PhD.
Director, Arthur B. Robinson Centre on Climate and Environmental Policy
The Heartland Institute
hs*******@*******nd.org

“RCP 8.5 became the climate establishment’s favourite tool because it generated the most frightening headlines, not because it reflected realistic energy or economic trends. For years, policymakers, media outlets and activists treated this extreme scenario as ‘business as usual,’ even though it assumed wildly unrealistic coal consumption, stagnant technological progress and population trajectories detached from observed reality.

“The damage from this manufactured panic extends far beyond climate science. RCP 8.5 was used to justify costly regulations, energy restrictions, attacks on reliable fossil fuels and endless taxpayer funding for speculative research built on worst-case assumptions. Entire industries of climate litigation, ESG investing and government intervention leaned heavily on projections that even many modellers privately acknowledged were improbable.

“President Trump deserves credit for calling attention to what many independent analysts have argued for years: public policy should not be driven by exaggerated computer simulations masquerading as settled science. If climate researchers want to restore public trust, they should begin by acknowledging how extensively RCP 8.5 distorted both scientific communication and public debate.”

Anthony Watts
Senior Fellow
The Heartland Institute
aw****@*******nd.org

“President Trump is absolutely right to celebrate the downfall of RCP 8.5. It was never an accurate model of the future.

“Now comes the next problem: There are hundreds, if not thousands, of studies in journals spanning biology, medicine, atmospheric science and others, that used RCP 8.5 as their high-end and even business-as-usual emissions scenario. These studies claimed this scenario represented a realistic forecast that would lead to imminent species destruction, human deaths and increasing natural disasters, none of which came to pass, and never were going to happen at all. All the most extreme studies were breathlessly reported in the media as though they were inevitable unless the world made extreme lifestyle changes to justify authoritarian government measures to crack down on farmers and energy producers.

“It was always nonsense, and it is fantastic that President Trump advocates for good science over agenda-driven modelling.”

Linnea Lueken
Senior Fellow
Arthur B. Robinson Centre on Climate and Environmental Policy
The Heartland Institute
ll*****@*******nd.org

“Why does it take the president of the United States to spell out today the decades-long scams of the many impossible scenarios of future atmospheric carbon dioxide planted by the UN IPCC? How can a future insisting of burning five times more coal than available in proven reserves be even entertained in the first place? President Trump should tell all the crony ‘scientists’ and fear-mongering science organisations: ‘You are all fired!’ More importantly, all their scientific research funding must be immediately terminated to prevent further thefts from the American taxpayers.”

Willie Soon, PhD.
Astrophysicist and geoscientist
CERES Science
Policy Advisor, The Heartland Institute
me***@*******nd.org

“The computer models upon which the RCP 8.5 conclusions were drawn are highly flawed. First and foremost, they assume that carbon dioxide is the principal driver of recent climate change, ignoring or improperly assessing natural drivers to the system. These include solar variability, cloud and water vapour feedback loops, and changes in oceanic geothermal forcing. Second, they assumed exponential growth in coal use that exceeded known reserves.

“The highly implausible products of these computer ‘ensembles’ were then transmitted to the scientific community via a biased system of communication, the ‘peer-review’ process. Peer review lends itself to groupthink by rewarding certain perspectives while excluding others. In the case of global warming, promulgating causal mechanisms that can be taxed and/or regulated –i.e., anthropogenic emissions of weak greenhouse gases – are the preferred drivers.

“I’m glad to see that the president has finally put an end to this nonsense. It’s time for us to follow the science and stop following the money.”

Arthur Viterito, PhD.
Policy Advisor
The Heartland Institute
me***@*******nd.org

About the Author

The Heartland Institute is one of the world’s leading free-market think tanks. It is a national nonprofit research and education organisation based in Arlington Heights, Illinois. Its mission is to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems.

Featured image: Donald Trump’s post on Truth Social, taken from Carbon Brief’s “fact check” blog that is desperately trying to save the climate catastrophe narrative.

Rhoda Wilson

While previously it was a hobby culminating in writing articles for Wikipedia (until things made a drastic and undeniable turn in 2020) and a few books for private consumption, since March 2020 I have become a full-time researcher and writer in reaction to the global takeover that came into full view with the introduction of covid-19. For most of my life, I have tried to raise awareness that a small group of people planned to take over the world for their own benefit. There was no way I was going to sit back quietly and simply let them do it once they made their final move.

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