Now I’m not picking on anyone in particular, but I would like to say to the self-identifying ‘climate deniers’ in the media and the public square generally, as the ‘reality denier alarmists’ like to call us … please don’t fall into the trap of trying to deny that the planet is warming. It is. And it is counterproductive and risky to credibility to be highlighting, for example, growing ice in the Antarctic, or rising islands in the Pacific as a way to discredit the alarmists.
We are not denying warming as a natural phenomenon; we are denying that climate changes because we burn fossil fuels. It is on that crucial separation of the two distinct issues that the fate of climate change policies depend.
As often stated and globally accepted, Earth’s climate changes as it has over millennia. (The ice age, remember…?) Challenging that is dumb and open to ridicule. Let’s direct ridicule at the fake claims about carbon dioxide spouted by wretched climate alarmists who have swallowed the propaganda and those alarmists who are riding it for personal benefit. A policy encouraging renewables is the cuckoo in the policy nest.
Since the climate alarm narrative was built on false claims of a scientific basis, it is that falsified scientific argument that needs to be deconstructed. Not that the planet is warming. It is warming, as it continues to emerge from the last ice age, at a low, nonthreatening rate.
So let’s indeed listen to the real science rather than ‘the science’ (a term hated by scientists for its ignorance of science). In a recent article (May 7, 2025) by the estimable climate scientist Judith Curry, co-authoring a paper with Harry DeAngelo, University of Southern California, the essence of what’s wrong with the climate change hysteria in the US and the world.
‘The apocalyptic climate narrative is a seriously misleading propaganda tool and a socially destructive guide for public policy. The narrative radically overstates the risks to humanity of continued global warming, which are manageable, not existential. It prescribes large-scale near-term suppression of fossil-fuel use, while failing to recognise the huge costs that such suppression would inflict on humans because fossil fuels are currently irreplaceable inputs for producing food (via ammonia-based fertiliser), steel, cement, and plastics.’
Think of the rush to renewables as a stampeded over the cliff. The Curry and DeAngelo paper, A Critique of the Apocalyptic Climate Narrative, explores the question of how dangerous this warming is.
‘Since the late 19th Century, with 1.3◦C of global warming, humanity has seen unprecedented increases in prosperity and well-being … since the early 1900s, per capita mortality from hurricanes, floods, droughts, and wildfires has decreased by almost 98 per cent. These favourable trends in weather- and climate-related mortality rates reveal that the world is now much better at preventing deaths from extreme weather and climate events than it was a century ago … a recent analysis summarising many studies finds no evidence to support claims that any part of the overall increase in global economic losses from weather and climate disasters can be attributed to global warming.’
What about warming over the rest of the 21st Century? Is there reason to expect dire consequences for humanity going forward in time, the authors ask. And answer: ‘The so-called threshold of danger of 2◦C warming since pre-industrial times is not an objective threshold of danger. Rather, 2◦C is a politically negotiated target designed to motivate broad-based actions to reduce emissions.’ Ah, politically negotiated…
As the authors note, ‘Fossil-fuel firms are also portrayed as the root cause of global warming. If humans did not desire the products made with fossil fuels, there would be no firms producing such products. Consumption demand by individual human beings is the root cause of fossil-fuel use and greenhouse-gas emissions. Net Zero policies are failing because they do not deal with this fundamental reality.’
In my view, this suggests that we can effectively write off any potential benefits of Net Zero policies.
They add (for a US audience), ‘If the United States hypothetically cut its greenhouse-gas emissions to zero today, there would be no reliably detectable effect on Earth’s weather or climate over the 21st Century.’ So just stop (spoiling your pants), alarmists and activists!
Andrew L. Urban is the author Climate Alarm Reality Check (Wilkinson)
