The UN’s international climate group has revised its set of possible climate change scenarios. They eliminated the most damaging scenario, because of progress in sustainable technologies and because details of the scenario itself seemed unlikely to occur. Trump and other climate deniers have seized upon this change to claim it shows all discussion of climate change is bogus. The following piece was contributed as a comment to an article in the Washington Post.

This article makes things seem much more complicated than they are. The first thing that I think is confusing to the general public is that all of these scenarios are attempts to predict what will happen as the world reacts to climate change–none of them talks about what will happen if we do nothing. They represent levels of response. So if Trump were really successful in sabotaging climate change efforts, the results would be off the charts, much worse than any of these scenarios.

The main thing that has changed since the scenarios were orginally developed is that we have seen some successes in starting to address climate change: solar and wind solutions have gotten much cheaper and on that basis they now represent most new electrical generation worldwide. Also electric cars are now better, cheaper, and more deployed. So IF such trends continue, we could end up not so bad as the worst case estimates of earlier. That what the changes say.

On the other hand, I’m willing to bet their models didn’t forsee the possibility that someone would actively try to sabotage the whole process for his own benefit despite the danger posed to all of humanity. But that’s where we are. And the oil campanies have contributed massively to that effort. All of them want to say that the new report shows that the whole climate change issue is bogus.

The real message is the opposite. We’re starting to show how we as a human race can address the challenge of climate change. We can win if we can beat back the politics of greed.