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climate science
The Fight Over Worst-Case Climate Scenarios Reveals a Science Communication Failure
When articles imply a scientific model was wrong when it was merely updated to reflect new data, they sow unfounded distrust in science and create space for climate disinformation.
Jun 02, 2026
After a new scientific paper advanced a climate modeling framework that replaced an old extreme climate scenario with a less severe one, President Donald Trump posted to social media that climate scientists had admitted to being “WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!” But it wasn’t a science mistake. It was a communication one.
Climate scenarios are not predictions. They are tools to understand how the climate would respond to different human actions, from rapid emissions cuts to current policies to backsliding into more fossil fuels. The most extreme widely-used pathway, called RCP8.5, studied a world with no climate policy and exceptionally high fossil fuel use through the rest of the century. Though always meant as an unlikely outlier, RCP8.5 has become far less plausible after a decade of accelerated clean energy deployment, to the point that this new paper proposed replacing it in future research. That should have been a climate win: Humans avoided the worst pathway and scientists revised models accordingly.
That this story could be so easily recast as scientific failure should be a wake-up call for science communicators. For years, journalists have favored alarm over nuance and problems over solutions, leaving the public poorly equipped to understand how uncertainty works or how climate action has improved future prospects. Without that context, every averted disaster can be mistaken for proof that the danger was made up at the outset.
Contrary to the president’s post, this pathway revision did not originate at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It came from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP), which convened an international group of scientists to devise an updated set of climate scenarios for future study. The group didn’t just toss RCP8.5. It published a new framework that removes implausible outliers at both extremes, includes more pathways where the world uses carbon removal technologies, and centers human emissions decisions more explicitly. In a news release, the IPCC clarified that CMIP is not under their umbrella, though the research will likely appear among the tens of thousands of studies analyzed for the IPCC’s next major report.
RCP8.5 is not wrong science. Rather, science provided a map of perilous futures, people changed course, and the map refreshed accordingly.
Yet in addition to Trump, the New York Post and Daily Caller falsely presented this shift as an IPCC scandal. The New York Times and Washington Post also implied in their headlines that scientists got something wrong. These framings defy the logic of climate scenarios. Scenarios are not future predictions. Rather, they consider several possible human actions and study how the climate system would respond to each.
The uncertainty in these scenarios is a feature, not a bug. To scientists, uncertainty does not mean knowing or not knowing, but rather how well something is known. In the case of a climate model, scientists know pumping more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere will warm the planet, but they cannot know exactly how much humans will emit; how strongly clouds, water vapor, surface reflectivity, and other feedbacks will amplify or dampen additional warming; or how oceans, forests, permafrost, and other natural systems will absorb or release carbon as the planet changes. Knowing this, scientists use ranges, error bars, assumptions, and confidence levels to communicate what a model can and can’t assert.
Like scientists, journalists seek the truth. However, journalists must hit far shorter word counts with far tighter deadlines. As such, they prefer hard facts and snappy quotes from authorities to convey information. They may see “uncertainty” as describing something unknown and thus irrelevant, not realizing how this thought process diverges from scientists'. Editors even less familiar with the topic may use the most conflict-charged framing or the scariest number in a range when they write headlines, favoring clicks over accuracy.
Typically, these issues are not nefarious. But when articles imply a scientific model was wrong when it was merely updated to reflect new data, they sow unfounded distrust in science and create space for climate disinformation.
In this case, changed human behavior is the new data point. When the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015, the world was projected to warm by nearly 4°C, not much better than the RCP8.5 nightmare scenario. Today, based only on current policies, that projection is down to 2.6°C. While that trajectory still presents major cause for concern, these improvements are substantial, drastically reducing the risk of reaching several tipping points this century including East Antarctic glacier collapse, northern permafrost collapse, and a West African monsoon shift.
If journalists want audiences to trust science, they must tell the whole story: the danger, the uncertainty, the progress, and the paths forward.
That progress comes largely from the fact that solar costs have fallen about 90%, onshore wind about 70%, and batteries by more than 90% in the last decade, now routinely besting fossil fuels on price. Several other clean technologies have emerged and scaled, many businesses have adopted more sustainable practices, and thousands of climate policies have been enacted globally. With these achievements, what was once a plausible outlier in RCP8.5 no longer makes sense as the upper bound for climate scenarios.
Had Americans encountered frequent climate solutions reporting over the past decade, scientists setting aside RCP8.5 would have made complete sense. Yet solutions journalism remains a growing but still niche practice. Many editors worry solutions stories could look like advocacy, garner less readership, or fail to qualify as news. Evidence demonstrates the opposite: Audiences view, share, and trust solutions stories more than problem stories, and climate solutions stories specifically increase readers’ self-efficacy relative to problem-oriented alternatives.
Journalists play an essential role in showing which solutions are driving progress, where they fall short, and how best practices can be replicated. Without that news, audiences are more likely to believe climate deniers were right than understand that substantial climate progress has been happening for years, just without the sustained attention it merited.
None of this reduces the urgency of climate change. A 2.6°C world would still be incredibly costly, unjust, and catastrophic. But urgency without context leaves communities unable to assess risk and recognize which actions work. RCP8.5 is not wrong science. Rather, science provided a map of perilous futures, people changed course, and the map refreshed accordingly.
If journalists want audiences to trust science, they must tell the whole story: the danger, the uncertainty, the progress, and the paths forward. Otherwise, every hard-earned climate win risks being twisted into a scandal.
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The Science Equivalent of Tearing Down the East Wing of the White House
The Trump administration’s decision to shut down the National Center for Atmospheric Research is the most traumatic item on a list of recent climate defeats.
Dec 19, 2025
It’s the end of the year, and so one should be compiling 10-best lists.
And I turned 65 last week, having spent almost my entire adult life in the climate fight, so it’s one of those moments when I wish I could look back with a certain amount of satisfaction.
But since I owe you honesty, not exuberance, just at the moment I can’t provide much celebration. I was hopeful this edition of the Crucial Years might be about a big victory—on Wednesday the board that controls New York City’s pension funds was considering whether or not to pull tens of billions from Blackrock because of the investment giant’s climate waffling, which would have been a massive display of courage. Sadly, the city Comptroller Brad Lander hadn’t gotten the measure on the agenda before the final meeting of his term, and he seems to have run out of time and political juice—the idea was tabled.
And so we’re left staring at a pile of recent defeats, at least in this country (which is an important qualification). I’ll try to end in a more hopeful place, but I fear you’re going to have to work through my angst with me for a few minutes.
The most traumatic item is the Trump administration’s decision to shut down the National Center for Atmospheric Research, born like me in 1960. It was a product of that era’s faith in science, a faith that paid off spectacularly. Take weather forecasting. As Nature reported Wednesday:
Work at NCAR played a key part in the rise of modern weather and climate forecasting. For instance, the lab pioneered the modern dropwindsonde, a weather instrument that can be released from an aircraft to measure conditions as it plummets through a storm. The technology reshaped the scientific understanding of hurricanes, says James Franklin, an atmospheric scientist and former branch chief of the hurricane specialist unit at the US National Hurricane Center in Miami, Florida.
But its most historically significant work has been in understanding the dimensions of the ongoing climate crisis. Nature again:
On the global scale, NCAR is known for its climate-modelling work, including the world-leading models that underpin international assessments such as those from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Hundreds of scientists pass through NCAR’s doors each year to collaborate with its researchers. More than 800 people are employed at NCAR, most of whom work at the centre’s three campuses in Boulder, including the iconic Mesa Lab that sits at the base of jagged mountain peaks and was designed by architect I. M. Pei.
There’s no question about why the administration is doing what it’s doing. Project 2025 enforcer Russell Vought explained it quite succinctly—NCAR must go because it is “one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country.” This is stupid—it’s like closing the fire department because it’s a source of “fire alarmism”—but it’s by now an entirely recognizable form of stupid. And it’s also sly: It’s like spraypainting over the surveillance cameras so you can rob the bank without anyone watching. But of course nothing changes with the underlying physics. Indeed, as the announcement came down, NCAR was closed for the day because:
the local electrical company planned to cut electricity preemptively to reduce wildfire risk as fierce winds were forecast around Boulder. In 2021, a wildfire ignited just kilometres from NCAR; fuelled by powerful winds, it ripped through suburban homes, killing two people. Many researchers say this is a new normal of increased fire risk in an era of climate change—a topic of study at NCAR.
I am glad people are rallying to fight—there was an emergency press conference Thursday at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, where many of the world’s Earth scientists are gathered. Third Act Colorado is working with Indivisible on a weekend rally. This is the scientific equivalent of tearing down the East Wing of the White House, and given the moment a lot more significant.
But I’m saddened to see how little our representatives in DC seem to really care, even the Democratic ones. Sixteen Democratic Senators voted Thursday to confirm President Donald Trump (and Elon Musk’s) nominee to head NASA, even though, as Brad Johnson pointed out in his Hill Heat newsletter, the administration is trying to slash science research at the agency in half. The new head, Jared Isaacman, is clearly on board. As he wrote this spring, “Take NASA out of the taxpayer funded climate science business and leave it for academia to determine.” But of course the administration is wrecking that too—they cut off the funding for the gold standard climate research program at Princeton on the grounds that it was “contributing to a phenomenon known as ‘climate anxiety,’ which has increased significantly among America’s youth.”
Too many Democratic leaders are feeling comfortable waving off climate concerns, because of a feeling that it might be a political problem for them. That was exemplified Thursday morning in the New York Times when center-right pundit Matt Yglesias issued a strident call for liberals to “support America’s oil and gas industry.” That he did it hours after that oil and gas industry won its fight to shutter climate research was probably coincidental, but the piece was a woebegone recycling of decades-old bad-faith arguments from a person who has insisted repeatedly that climate change is not an existential risk. Yglesias wants us to follow Obama-era "all of the above" energy policies even though they date from 15 years ago, when clean energy was more expensive than dirty, and long before we had the batteries that could make solar and wind fully useful. It’s no longer a good argument, but he has not changed his tune one iota—he keeps invoking Barack Obama, as if what was passable policy in 2008 still made sense.
The centerpiece of his argument is that we should support the gas industry because at least it produces less carbon than coal.
It is much cleaner than coal, consumption of which is still high and rising globally. Increased gas production, by displacing coal, has been the single largest driver of American emissions reductions over time. To the extent that foreign countries can be persuaded to rely on American gas exports rather than coal to fill the gaps left by the ongoing build-out of intermittent wind and solar that’s a climate win.
By now anyone following this debate knows that this is a mendacious point. That’s because the switch to gas has reduced American carbon emissions at the cost of increasing American methane emissions. Those who, like Yglesias, followed last year’s debate over pausing permitting for liquefied natural gas export terminals know that the crucial point was the science showing that in fact American LNG exports were worse than coal. The job is to get others to switch to solar, not coal—and that’s happening everywhere except the US, whose appetite for the stuff is apparently the thing still driving up global consumption even as demand drops in China and India.
Having written many many op-eds for the Times, I know that they fact-check things like the methane numbers; this should not have eluded them, but in fairness it’s eluded Democrats for decades, because gas has been such a convenient out for those unwilling to stand up to Big Oil. If I sound sore here, it’s because I’ve tried and failed to get this basic point of physics across; it’s just technical enough that senators often forget it, but ostensibly serious people like Yglesias should at least grapple with it.
All of this comes on the 10th anniversary of the Paris climate talks—and 10th anniversary of the Congress and (Democratic) president approving the resumption of US oil exports. I celebrated my 55th in Paris, and I remember being hunched over a laptop at a cafe writing what I think may have been the only op-ed opposing that resumption. As I said at the time:
It’s especially galling that Senate leaders—Republicans and Democrats—are apparently talking about trading this gift to Exxon and its ilk for tax breaks for wind and solar providers. It’s hard to imagine a better illustration of politicians who simply don’t understand the physics of climate change. We don’t need more of all kinds of energy—we need more of the clean stuff and way, way less of the dirty. Physics doesn’t do backroom deals.
And indeed the senators who said it was no big deal were wrong. America is, as Tony Dutzik pointed out this week, now the biggest oil exporter on Earth. He lays out the case nicely:
“There is currently little if any incentive for US oil producers to export crude oil even if the ban is lifted,” wrote Michael Levi of the Council on Foreign Relations, for example, in December 2015.
A decade later, those breezy assessments have proven to be wildly off-base. “The United States produces more crude oil than any country, ever,” reads a 2024 headline from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), one of the agencies that got it wrong. Not only did lifting the crude export ban lead to a surge in oil production, but it also dramatically reshaped the global energy system, US politics, and greenhouse gas emissions.
So, anyway, feeling a little sad. But I do think this is a low point, because I think around the rest of the world, where Trump (and pundits like Yglesias) have marginally less sway, things are continuing to break the right way. In fact, earlier today the premier journal Science picked its scientific “Breakthrough of the Year” and it turned out to be not some fascinating if arcane new discovery, but instead the prosaic but powerful spread of renewable energy around the planet:
This year, renewables surpassed coal as a source of electricity worldwide, and solar and wind energy grew fast enough to cover the entire increase in global electricity use from January to June, according to energy think tank Ember. In September, Chinese President Xi Jinping declared at the United Nations that his country will cut its carbon emissions by as much as 10% in a decade, not by using less energy, but by doubling down on wind and solar. And solar panel imports in Africa and South Asia have soared, as people in those regions realized rooftop solar can cheaply power lights, cellphones, and fans. To many, the continued growth of renewables now seems unstoppable—a prospect that has led Science to name the renewable energy surge its 2025 Breakthrough of the Year.
The tsunami of tech spilling from China’s factories has changed the country’s energy landscape—and its physical one, too. For decades China’s development was synonymous with coal, which produced choking air pollution and massive carbon emissions, still greater than those of all other developed nations combined. Now, solar panels carpet deserts and the high, sunstruck plateau of Tibet, and wind turbines up to 300 meters tall guard coastlines and hilltops (see photo essay, below). China’s solar power generation grew more than 20-fold over the past decade, and its solar and wind farms now have enough capacity to power the entire United States.
China’s burgeoning exports of green tech are transforming the rest of the world, too. Europe is a longtime customer, but countries in the Global South are also rushing to buy China’s solar panels, batteries, and wind turbines, spurred by market forces and a desire for energy independence. In Pakistan, for example, imports of Chinese solar panels grew fivefold from 2022 to ’24 as the Ukraine war pushed up natural gas prices and the cost of grid power. “For people who were asking, ‘How am I going to keep the lights on in my home,’ it was a very obvious choice,” says Lauri Myllyvirta, an analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. In South Africa, old and unreliable coal plants drove a similar dynamic. Ethiopia has embraced solar and wind amid worries that hydropower, the country’s mainstay, will decline as droughts become more frequent.
That’s the fight as we head into 2026. Trump and Big Oil have had the run of things this year, but their idiocy is pushing up against limits: Among other things, it turns out that permitting every data center imaginable while cutting off the supply of cheap sun and wind is sending energy prices through the roof, which may be a real issue as midterms loom.
I’m not retiring—I’m here for the fight, and you too I hope.
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The Trump Admin's Climate Denial Proposal Contradicts Science, Law, and Public Opinion
The world’s highest court recently affirmed that climate action is a legal duty and that governments must regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
Aug 24, 2025
When US Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, Administrator Lee Zeldin announced last month his official proposal to rescind the agency’s foundational determination that greenhouse gas emissions endanger human health and welfare, he insinuated that previous administrations (under former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden) had “twisted the law, ignored precedent, and warped science” in order to achieve their regulatory agendas. And the regulations of these planet-warming emissions, not the emissions themselves like carbon dioxide, are “the real threat to Americans’ livelihoods,” Zeldin suggested.
EPA’s greenhouse gas endangerment finding, established in 2009, serves as the basis of its legal obligation under the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from sources such as motor vehicles and power plants. The finding was based on an extensive review of the scientific record, which has gotten even more robust over the last 16 years, and has survived all legal challenges brought against it.
The Trump administration’s move to do away with the finding contradicts the overwhelming scientific evidence that greenhouse gas emissions are driving dangerous climate change impacts. There are also arguments to be made that it is unlawful. And, it goes against the pleas of the hundreds of Americans who have spoken out this week in opposition to Zeldin’s sweeping deregulatory proposal. In other words, contrary to Zeldin’s assertion, it is actually the Trump administration that is twisting or ignoring the law and public sentiment and warping science.
Let’s start with the science. The world’s premier body of climate scientists—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—has stated that it is “unequivocal” that human activities are warming the planet and causing rapid and widespread changes, such as more extreme weather, that are unprecedented over millennia. The US Fifth National Climate Assessment report observes that “harmful impacts from more frequent and severe extremes are increasing across the country” and notes that “climate changes are making it harder to maintain safe homes and healthy families; reliable public services; a sustainable economy; thriving ecosystems, cultures, and traditions; and strong communities.” These are authoritative statements from reports involving hundreds of scientists and extensive peer review.
What the Trump administration is doing with repealing the endangerment finding and all GHG regulations that flow from it, therefore, could be a violation of international law under the ICJ’s recent advisory opinion.
But to support its proposal to rescind the endangerment finding, Trump’s EPA relies instead on a new report issued by the Department of Energy (DOE) that rejects the scientific consensus on climate change and claims that GHG emissions and climate impacts are not harmful. The report, hastily written by five climate skeptics over a period of just two months, recycles many climate denialist talking points and, according to one analysis, includes over 100 false or misleading statements. As science historian Naomi Oreskes puts it, “Climate denial is now the official policy of the US government.”
“What the Trump administration and the Department of Energy did is pull together this small hand-picked group of people to work in secret to write this report that questions that mountain of scientific evidence that climate change is harming people,” said Erin Murphy, a senior attorney at Environmental Defense Fund (EDF).
“In and of itself, the conclusions of that report are inaccurate and inconsistent with the vast, vast majority of scientific findings and the consensus across the scientific community,” she added. “But also, the report is inconsistent with federal law.”
EDF and the Union of Concerned Scientists have filed a lawsuit against the DOE, the EPA, and the group of five climate skeptics arguing that the secretive manner in which the report was pulled together violates the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which mandates transparency and opportunities for public engagement in government advisory proceedings.
The report has not gone through formal peer review, and although it is currently open to public comment, the time window for commenting is limited to just 30 days (closing on September 2) during a month when many people take vacations or might otherwise be unavailable. And until this week, none of the hundreds of comments that have come in were publicly visible. That hiding of the comments, Murphy said, “further underscores the government’s efforts to do this in secret.”
The lawsuit aims to block the Trump administration from using this report in its efforts to rescind the endangerment finding.
It was clear to me that the speakers—from environmental groups, the medical community and scientists to municipal and state governments and private citizens—were overwhelmingly united in their disapproval of the nixing of EPA’s foundational finding that GHG emissions endanger our health and welfare.
Even if EPA plows ahead and finalizes its move to eliminate the finding, that action will certainly be challenged in court. It remains to be seen what legal arguments environmental groups and other challengers will put forth.
One thing that is clear is that climate action is no longer optional, but rather a legal obligation, as several international courts have affirmed in recent landmark climate change advisory opinions. The International Court of Justice, considered the world’s highest court, delivered its opinion on July 23. The ICJ clarified that states have obligations under multiple sources of international law to reduce emissions and that governments must regulate the emissions of private actors. The customary law duty to prevent significant environmental harm to the climate system, which applies to all countries regardless of whether they are parties to specific treaties, includes putting in place “regulatory mitigation mechanisms” to reduce GHG emissions, the court said. Such rules “must regulate the conduct of public and private operators.” According to the court, failure to act in good faith to regulate emissions could be considered an unlawful act.
What the Trump administration is doing with repealing the endangerment finding and all GHG regulations that flow from it, therefore, could be a violation of international law under the ICJ’s recent advisory opinion. And while the opinion itself is nonbinding, it may be invoked in domestic court proceedings around the world, including in the US.
Zeldin’s endangerment finding rescission also seems to be untenable in the court of public opinion. “In repealing the endangerment finding, the Trump administration is stepping far out of line with public opinion, as voters across partisanship are in strong agreement that greenhouse gas emissions are a threat to public health and should be regulated,” Data for Progress says in reference to new poll results it released last week.
EPA held virtual public hearings last week on its proposal, and almost everyone who testified spoke in opposition to eliminating the endangerment finding. Out of the roughly 200 people who spoke on Tuesday, fewer than 10 voiced support for EPA’s rollback, Inside Climate News reports. I tuned into some of the hearings on Wednesday and Thursday, and it was clear to me that the speakers—from environmental groups, the medical community and scientists to municipal and state governments and private citizens—were overwhelmingly united in their disapproval of the nixing of EPA’s foundational finding that GHG emissions endanger our health and welfare.
“The EPA has a responsibility to regulate greenhouse gases for what they are—a clear, present, and growing threat to the health and well-being of every American,” Kim Cobb, a climate scientist, told the EPA panel in concluding her testimony.
Tiffany Covarrubias Lyttle, a registered nurse and mother of seven children, said during her testimony that the father of her children recently passed away from cancer, specially an environmentally triggered adenocarcinoma.
“Repealing environmental protections and rescinding [the endangerment] finding will make stories like mine more common,” Lyttle said. “Clean air, clean water, and a stable climate aren’t just environmental issues. They are in fact a matter of life and death.”
This piece was originally published on Dana Drugmand’s Substack One Earth Now on August 21, 2025.
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