The religion of climate alarmism is in decline. The election of Donald Trump, along with high-profile defections from the climate alarmist priesthood, has begun to alter the debate over climate change.
Trump’s election brought to Washington cadres of climate change realists who are transforming the U.S. energy sector. Let’s hope they’re not too late. The Biden crackdown on fossil fuels and the continued demonization of nuclear power have put the United States behind the eight ball on energy. With the massive increase in demand for electricity going hand-in-hand with the artificial intelligence revolution, it’s an open question whether or not we can keep pace with the electrical needs of AI data centers and other infrastructure to maintain the momentum of change.
The last year has seen some extraordinary changes in the debate over climate change. The counterrevolution is being led by what the mainstream media calls “climate deniers” (a deliberate takeoff of “Holocaust deniers”) but can more accurately be referred to as “climate realists.”
Public policy expert Roger Pielke, the environmental scientist Steven Koonin, Judith Curry, the former chair of Georgia Tech’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, the Danish political scientist Bjorn Lomborg, and Michael Shellenberger, the former activist and author of Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, among others, questioned the orthodoxy. They didn’t deny that the climate was changing. Their sin was in not catastrophizing climate change.
The Free Press’s Peter Savodnik writes that “they disagreed about the extent to which the warming was ‘anthropogenic,’ or man-made, and they criticized the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and 2015 Paris Agreement and proposals like the Green New Deal, which they considered excessive at best, and probably counterproductive.”
For this apostasy, those scientists, science journalists, and others were banished.
What is it they disagreed with?
In the next few decades, “every place on Earth—the temperature will be hotter than it’s ever been,” environmental activist Bill McKibben said in 2013.
We are “the last generation that can do something,” President Barack Obama insisted while addressing the 2015 climate change summit in Paris.
“You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words!” Greta Thunberg thundered while addressing world leaders in 2019.
The tide is definitely turning.
A man who had contributed tens of millions of his own dollars to climate hysteria organizations, Bill Gates, left the reservation and claimed the world was not going to end.
He wrote in an op-ed on his personal website, “Although climate change will have serious consequences—particularly for people in the poorest countries—it will not lead to humanity’s demise. People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future.” Gates wanted to solve more mundane problems like poverty before tackling climate change.
The new wind of climate realism blew through Washington soon after Trump was inaugurated. The Energy and Natural Resources Committee’s hearing for Donald Trump’s nominee for Energy Secretary, Chris Wright, featured not only Wright calmly and expertly shooting down attacks on his realistic approach to energy and climate change, but two Democratic Senators, John Hickenlooper and Michael Bennet, both from Colorado, endorsed him and his realistic approach to climate and American energy independence.
Other leaders have modified their hysteria as well.
Canada’s Liberal prime minister Mark Carney, who once championed net-zero carbon emissions as the UN’s Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance, soon after introduced a budget seeking to revivify the country’s liquefied natural gas sector while eliminating anti-“greenwashing” measures favored by his predecessor, Justin Trudeau.
Even UN Secretary-General António Guterres is sounding more restrained these days.
A year ago, at a UN climate summit in oil-rich Azerbaijan, Guterres warned that we face a “ticking clock”—adding that “we are in the final countdown to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius.”
But last month, the secretary-general conceded that it was now inevitable that we would exceed the 1.5-degree threshold. Instead of warning of any looming catastrophes, he was now talking about ushering in a new era of “clean energy.”
Lomborg, the political scientist, told me: “I believe that we are witnessing a broader, more balanced reassessment of climate change.”
Don’t wait for an apology from Al Gore, Greta Thunberg, or the dozens of scientists who equated climate realism with Holocaust denial. They have too much of their reputations invested in climate alarmism and will never stop predicting disaster.
“The dirty secret is that the old notion that we need to abandon the economic advantage of using cheap, dirty energy to satisfy the moral imperative of taking advantage of clean, expensive energy doesn’t really apply anymore,” Marc Dunkelman, a political historian at Brown University, wrote in an email to Savodnik. “We’ve got the technology to make clean energy cheap.”
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a 1962 book by Thomas Kuhn, claims that scientific progress is not achieved “in laboratories filled with bespectacled, data-focused scientists immune to politics and culture,” writes Savodnik.
On the contrary, he adds, “The people who do science—not only the researchers, but those who administer their departments and universities, the philanthropists and billionaires who fund their research, the influencers and politicians who align themselves with it and talk about it and build their brands around it—have a vested interest in whatever hypothesis or scientific theory they have constructed their careers around.”
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We will look back on this period in the history of science as the Dark Ages, when knowledge and power resided with politicians and scientists who abused the scientific process for their own selfish ends. They ruined careers, breaking the will of good men and women with whom they disagreed, while performing a terrible disservice to science itself.
They betrayed the fundamental tenets of the scientific process: the rigorous, unflinching search for facts. They forgot that it is not a search for “truth.” For that, look to religion.
Eventually, the facts win out, although we will be a long time recovering from the damage done by the betrayers of the scientific process.
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