In late June, the prestigious Foreign Policy journal published an article by Jason Bordoff and Noah Kaufman of Columbia University’s Centre on Global Energy Policy under the arresting headline: ‘Doomsday Climate Scenarios Were Wrong. That Doesn’t Help Europe.’ The timing is significant. The piece appears after the IPCC’s own modelling community had formally declared RCP8.5 — the most extreme emissions pathway that has underpinned virtually every headline climate projection, every Net Zero urgency claim, and every green policy justification for the past two decades — to be “implausible”.
Bordoff and Kaufman, to their credit, acknowledge that critics of climate alarmism have a point. Too many advocates treated worst-case scenarios as likely outcomes. Too much apocalyptic language outran the evidence. President Biden’s 2022 declaration that “climate change is literally an existential threat to our nation and to the world”, they concede, overstated the case. You might think this admission would occasion some reflection on the institutions, models and political programmes built on that discredited foundation. You would be wrong.
Having issued these concessions, Bordoff and Kaufman spend the remainder of their article arguing, with remarkable facility, that nothing has really changed. The doomsday scenario is gone, but alarm must be maintained to avoid complacency. The logic is worth examining carefully, since it represents the most sophisticated version of a move now being executed across the climate establishment as the ground shifts beneath its feet: the pivot from overt apocalypticism to what might be called ‘non-alarmist alarmism’ — a posture that formally
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“This is not risk management; it is a philosophical blank cheque, an abuse of the precautionary principle. It licenses unlimited expenditure on policies whose actual protective value against the feared outcomes is either unmeasurable or negligible.”
Spot on. It’s pure insanity. A parallel argument goes like this:
“The occasion for the Bordoff-Kaufman piece is last week’s European heatwave, invoked to demonstrate…”
FFS. Why am I not surprised? It was a heatwave FFS. I suppose you could interpret it as the first, distant growl (“Diiiinnnnssssdale…???”) of a galactic hedgehog. If you were clinically paranoid-schizophrenic.
Climate change is like the covid madness. The vast majority of people got swept up by the scare and got behind it. And no one wants to look foolish. So most people aren’t going to openly admit they got it wrong. At best they’ll stop talking about it.
And when it comes to the establishment, you can multiply that effect several times. Reputations, careers, money – lots of money – is at stake.
Climate madness is not even close to being dead.
“At best they’ll stop talking about it.”
At very best – for them – they’ll stop talking about it, but carry on quietly handing out our money to the spivs who are doing so well out of this scam.
Here’s unequivocal proof that Net Zero is a dangerous fraud: https://thinkscotland.org/2026/07/revealed-severe-setbacks-to-establishment-net-zero-narrative/.
People have been predicting the end of the world for millennia. Usually when reality declines to comply the prophets of doom admit they have got the original date wrong and pick another one.
The prophets of doom usually have a conviction immune to contrary evidence.
The alarmists are evil, communist scum who will certainly not give up their efforts to destroy freedom and democracy. Increasing numbers of the public are seeing through the scam and there will be a reckoning.
If, as Adler and colleagues argue ‘no insurance policy is worthwhile if the cost of the premiums exceeds the protection purchased‘, that’s surely especially so if only 20% of those at risk (i.e. the EU, UK, Australia etc.) are willing to pay the premium, with 80% of those at risk (i.e. the rest of the world) having no interest in paying their share.