Donald Trump says he doesn’t believe in climate change.Image: keystone
US President Trump is rabid, German right-wing populists are celebrating: the climate catastrophe has been “cancelled,” they conclude from a revision of the climate models. But is that true?
May 19, 2026, 9:57 p.mMay 19, 2026, 9:57 p.m
Matti Hartmann / t-online
The right-wing populist portal “Tichys Insight” is happy: “The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts the end of the world,” says an article by Roland Tichy himself. The “high priests of climate change” would suddenly declare the opposite of “what has frightened us for years,” he claims. And Donald Trump said on his network Truth Social over the weekend that the United Nations’ top climate council had just admitted that its own forecasts were incorrect. “INCORRECT! INCORRECT! WRONG!” wrote the US President in capital letters and scolded the “stupid Democrats”.
What is actually true: climate researchers from the World Climate Research Program consider the previous worst-case scenario for global warming to be “implausible” given the expansion of renewable energies. Otherwise, since the weekend, a number of scientists have angrily rejected Trump and Tichy’s interpretations.
Niklas Höhne, co-founder of the New Climate Institute in Cologne, wrote to the Science Media Center upon request: “In my opinion, it is irresponsible and also understandable how climate skeptics, right-wing media and the Trump administration are abusing this situation for their own purposes.”
The controversy is about the so-called SSP5-8.5 scenario, which describes a world with strong economic growth and very high use of fossil fuels. According to Diana Rechid from the Helmholtz Center Hereon, the fact that this scenario is no longer considered realistic is “great news”: the technological, economic and political achievements of the past few years have led to the rejection of the worst-case scenario put forward more than 15 years ago. This could be an incentive to accelerate climate protection efforts in view of accelerating climate change. The message has the potential to “give you courage that we can achieve something together.”
Mitigated worst case scenario still catastrophic
The Dutch scientist Detlef van Vuuren, the lead author of the World Climate Research article published in April, points, among other things, to the reduced costs of renewable energy. But this should by no means be seen as an all-clear, emphasizes the climate researcher. The consequences of global warming are still serious even in a weaker worst-case scenario with global warming of 3.5 degrees by 2100.
Niklas Höhne from the Cologne New Climate Institute even emphasizes that science today assumes much more serious effects for a certain temperature level than ten years ago. In particular, the probability of tipping points is estimated to be significantly higher today. “This means that the effects of the current scenario with the highest emissions are about as serious as the worst-case scenario expected ten years ago,” explains Höhne. Claiming that climate science is wrong and that “climate change won’t kill us” is not based on facts.
The prospect of a possible Super El Nino event in 2026/27, exacerbated by climate change, is particularly worrying: according to current forecasts, this would “certainly lead to a significant number of deaths from storms, droughts and food shortages”. Höhne: “If the Trump administration was really interested in facts, it wouldn’t cut jobs in science en masse.”
The best scenario is bleaker
What Trump and Tichy also left out: The scientists at the World Climate Research Program have also corrected the best-case scenario for the period up to the end of the century: They now assume that the goal of keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees compared to the pre-industrial era will be abandoned, at least in the meantime. Since greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise in recent years, it is no longer possible to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees.
According to the Federal Environment Ministry, even a warming of 1.5 degrees should not be underestimated: “We already suspect today what a world with 1.5 degrees of warming alone means: more droughts, heat waves, forest dieback, floods or other extreme weather events.”
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