Debunked: No, the United Nations did not ‘admit’ that climate change is a hoax

UPDATED PROJECTIONS FOR the impact of climate change have prompted the fake story that the United Nations (UN) has “admitted” that climate change is a hoax.

The view of both the UN and the overwhelming consensus of scientists remains that human activities are altering the earth’s climate at an unsustainable rate.

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the global authority on distilling research on the subject, has said: “human activities, principally through emissions of greenhouse gases, have unequivocally caused global warming”, noting temperatures have already risen by more than one degree since the latter nineteenth century.

“Continued greenhouse gas emissions will lead to increasing global warming, with the best estimate of reaching 1.5°C in the near term.”

However, a new report did say that humanity’s efforts to avert climate change have already made the absolute worst-case scenario too unlikely to be worth modelling in its future reports.

“The UN have finally announced that climate change never existed,” begins a 10 October post by an Irish Facebook user.

“Meanwhile, the Greens signed us up to massive carbon taxes just because they could, the payment for propping up the FFG lot… and because of this, countries like Ireland are being destroyed.”

The post, which has been shared more than 150 times, features a screenshot of a post on X that reads: “The UN has publicly announced that climate change never existed. Solar power generation was just about vested interests. All man-made.”

That post, which also features a clip from Fox Business, has been shared more than 939 times since it was posted to X on 9 October.

The claims in both of these posts are false. The UN has made no statement to the effect that climate change has never existed.

The clip in the X post shows Fox Business host Stuart Varney speaking to camera, as the onscreen chyron reads: “UN withdraws worst-case climate conclusion”.

“There needs to be a reckoning,” a guest on Varney’s show, Daniel Turner, says.

“This wasn’t just a mistake in climate calculation or in science. There are whole countries that destroyed their economies,” Turner continues, naming the UK as an example.

“These scientists, for political reasons, did great, great damage to the world.”

Turner is the founder and leader of Power The Future, a lobby group that advocates for the use of fossil fuels and derides renewable energy.

However, despite Turner’s comments, there’s no evidence that a mistake was made at all.

The discussion in the clip is the result of selective reporting. A research paper had said the previous worst-case climate scenario was implausible. However, it abandoned the best-case scenario too.

In a paper released in April 2026, a group of scientists compared the scenario models for climate change.

Despite headlines, this wasn’t released by the UN, but by the European Geosciences Union, and coordinated in part by the World Climate Research Program.

However, these models may be used in future UN reports.

This created a range of possibilities, including one which they call the “High emission scenario”, which envisions a “rollback of current mitigation policies”.

In other words, that scenario could unfold if we reverse some of the green measures we’ve already implemented, such as by reopening coal mines or abandoning solar energy. 

The report says that even this high-emissions scenario was expected to result in less climate change than had been predicted under the previous scenario, called SSP5-8.5, or RCP8.5, or just 8.5.

The numbers refer to the additional watts of energy the earth would have per square metre in this model. The RCP models focused only on physical science, while the later-developed SSPs also model economic and sociological effects. 

The report said that the 8.5 scenario had become unlikely “based on trends in the costs of renewables, the emergence of climate policy and recent emission trends.”

In other words, because of global efforts to combat climate change, even in the worst plausible scenarios, global temperatures would still rise dangerously, but at a slower rate than if we had done nothing at all. 

However, the report also outlined what might happen in a new best-case “low-to-negative emissions scenario”, in which the temperature of the earth rises by at least 1.5 degrees before dropping again by the end of the century.

The previous common low-emission scenario was called SSP1-1.9, first outlined in 2011, and outlined a path that would see the world shift “gradually, but pervasively, toward a more sustainable path.”

Under that old best-case scenario, hitting 1.5 degrees of warming was considered “more likely than not to occur”.

Under the new best-case scenario, it is taken for granted that average temperatures will rise by at least 1.5 degrees, though envisions additional environmental efforts that limit the overshoot.

These models were not provided as predictions: they were seen as a roadmap of potential outcomes, with the old worst-case “8.5″ model being a “baseline scenario”, with no climate mitigation target.

In other words, the model outlined the path we were on if we didn’t take steps to stop climate change. Since then, we have taken steps, and so that model is currently considered implausible.

Updating models in this way is normal, and even used by people in their day-to-day lives.

For example, a person might advise the people they are walking with that, at their current pace, it would take an hour to get to their destination.

If the other people start sprinting, this estimate of an hour-long journey becomes implausible — but not because the speaker was originally wrong.

The new scenarios outlined by the paper in the European Geosciences Union range from briefly overshooting 1.5 degrees of warming before plateauing around 2050, to more than 5 degrees of global warming by 2150.

Ultimately, a revision of likely future scenarios is not an admission that climate change is not real. Updating models of the future as situations evolve is a sign of good science, not an admission that scientists got it wrong.  

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