From Tilak´s Substack

By Tilak Doshi

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 disowns the discredited scenario while preserving every policy conclusion that scenario was used to support.

The implausible scenario that built a trillion-dollar edifice

To understand what has been conceded, it is worth recalling what RCP8.5 actually assumed. This was a pathway that projected global coal consumption to quintuple by the end of the century — a trajectory so divorced from physical reality, from known reserves and from observed energy trends that Roger Pielke Jr. of the University of Colorado, a longtime critic of the misuse of extreme climate scenarios, rightly wrote in the Washington Post that “the climate apocalypse isn’t around the corner after all”. Despite being designed as a high-end boundary case for stress-testing models — never as a ‘business as usual’ trajectory — RCP8.5 was cited more than 45,000 times in academic literature, deployed routinely by the World Economic Forum, the European Commission, the ECB climate stress tests and every European climate minister from Stockholm to Madrid. It was the backbone of the EU Green Deal, the UK Climate Change Act, the Fit for 55 package, the nitrogen rules that drove European farmers to the barricades and two decades of energy policy that produced the continent’s deindustrialisation and unaffordable electricity bills. This was not a minor modelling detail. It was the central pillar of the entire Net Zero project. Now it has been declared implausible by the very institution that propagated it.

One might have expected a moment of institutional accountability. Instead, the climate establishment of the collective West chose to double down. Bordoff and Kaufman’s Foreign Policy piece is the most intellectually presentable version of this doubling-down. Its central move is to acknowledge the failure of the extreme scenario while preserving the urgency that scenario was used to generate. Since the worst-case cannot now be claimed as likely, the argument shifts to the unknowable: “What may matter most is not what climate outcomes are expected but which cannot be ruled out.” Because we cannot rule out catastrophe, we must proceed as though catastrophe is likely.

The abuse of risk and the logic of the infinite premium

The intellectual architecture here draws on Harvard economist Martin Weitzman’s ‘fat tail’ argument: when outcomes are uncertain and potentially catastrophic, conventional cost-benefit analysis understates the case for action, and precautionary spending is always justified. Bordoff and Kaufman invoke this reasoning explicitly, noting that “uncertainty about climate damages is not a reason to abandon climate safeguards” but rather “a reason to take them more seriously”. The Trump administration, they argue, has drawn precisely the wrong conclusion from the limits of climate economics in choosing to abandon damage estimates.

There is a fundamental problem with this reasoning that Bordoff and Kaufman do not address. As Jonathan Adler and colleagues argued in their 2000 paper for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, “no insurance policy is worthwhile if the cost of the premiums exceeds the protection purchased”. The Weitzman framework, as its critics have noted, has no upper bound: if worst-case outcomes of unbounded severity cannot be ruled out, no premium however large is irrational.

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. We might only know after one or two centuries. However, the costs of those policies, in higher energy prices, deindustrialisation, impoverished households and immiserated developing economies, are immediate, concrete and borne overwhelmingly by those least able to afford them. The Weitzman argument, deployed in this way, strengthens the case for climate action by removing the obligation to demonstrate that the action is effective or proportionate. The ‘end of the world’ is beyond debate, beyond measurement.

Bordoff and Kaufman’s treatment of the Paris Agreement temperature targets reveals the same sleight of hand. They acknowledge that the 1.5°C and 2°C thresholds “were never the output of a neat optimisation model” but “appropriately, socially negotiated markers of tolerable risk”. This is a candid admission that the targets which have driven trillions of dollars of policy, reshaped the energy economies of entire continents and been used to justify the suppression of domestic fossil fuel production are, at root, political constructs. They have no rigorous scientific derivation. They are, as climate economist Richard Tol has long argued, arbitrary round numbers that crystallised through a process of diplomatic negotiation rather than empirical analysis. Once this is admitted, the question that must follow — and which Bordoff and Kaufman do not ask — is why policies of such vast economic consequence should be built on foundations of such admitted arbitrariness.

Heatwaves, cold deaths and the selective presentation of evidence

The occasion for the Bordoff-Kaufman piece is last week’s European heatwave, invoked to demonstrate that a “hotter, more unstable and more costly world already is” upon us even if the apocalypse has been postponed. The Economist’s estimate of 12,000 excess deaths from three days of extreme heat is cited. This is presented as evidence that the retreat from alarmism is dangerous complacency.

But this selective emphasis on heat deaths is a form of what Bjørn Lomborg has rightly called “textbook climate deception”. The same Lancet papers cited by climate advocates have estimated roughly five million annual deaths globally from non-optimal temperatures — with cold-related deaths outnumbering heat-related ones by nearly 10 to one. In Europe specifically, cold deaths outnumber heat deaths by a ratio of three to one. A warmer world saves lives in winter in quantities that dwarf the additional heat deaths in summer. Bordoff and Kaufman present half the temperature mortality ledger and draw conclusions from it.

More striking still is what the authors omit about human adaptation. Deaths from extreme weather events — hurricanes, floods, droughts — have fallen by more than 97% since the 1920s, even as the global population has more than quadrupled and gentle warming has continued. Population-adjusted risk has declined by over 99%. This is not evidence of a world becoming less able to cope with climate variability; it is evidence of exactly the opposite.

The heat mortality numbers that alarmed Bordoff and Kaufman are themselves heavily influenced by Europe’s rapidly ageing population, vulnerable to heatwaves in summer where air conditioning is seen as a luxury. As Lomborg has noted, these observed increases in heat deaths are “largely explained by Europe’s ageing population” rather than by temperature trends. None of this appears in the Foreign Policy piece.

UK councils are ordering homeowners to remove their air conditioning units in the middle of a heatwave – because it violates Net Zero rules. Active cooling is now officially the ‘last resort’ after fans and open windows, even at 38-40°C. Europeans visiting the US for the World Cup marvel not only at the size of iced water drinks served free along with their huge meals in air-conditioned restaurants but the air-conditioning of entire stadiums for the World Cup football venues in the summer heat of Atlanta, Houston or Dallas.

The Hormuz sleight of hand

Bordoff and Kaufman also invoke the Strait of Hormuz crisis to strengthen the case for “electrification”. Energy security concerns, they argue, reinforce the case for domestic electricity from renewables and nuclear, reducing exposure to “war, coercion and price spikes in an increasingly fragmented world”. This argument has a surface plausibility that evaporates on contact with the actual structure of global energy demand.

The Hormuz crisis demonstrated the indispensability of fossil fuels across the entire breadth of the modern economy, not merely the electricity sector. The IEA’s own data show that electricity accounts for only around 21% of total global final energy consumption. The remaining 79% is met by the direct combustion of fossil fuels in transport, industrial heat, agriculture, shipping, aviation and as feedstock for petrochemicals. Jet engines do not run on solar power. Blast furnaces cannot be electrified on any meaningful scale with current technology.

When the Hormuz strait closed, it was this 79% that delivered the global economic shock — the jet fuel that surged 50%, the diesel that raised costs for every lorry and tractor, the fertiliser feedstocks that threatened agricultural supply chains from South Asia to sub-Saharan Africa. A programme of renewable electricity deployment addresses, at most, one-fifth of this vulnerability. The other four-fifths do not feature in the Bordoff-Kaufman analysis.

The authors are also silent on the geopolitical implications of the renewable supply chains on which their proposed solution depends. According to the IEA, China controls more than 80% of every stage of solar panel manufacturing and leads refined production for 19 of the 20 key energy transition minerals. The diversification away from Middle Eastern oil that Bordoff and Kaufman prescribe would, in practice, mean exchanging one geopolitical dependency for a far more concentrated one. A crisis involving China — over Taiwan, trade or simple export restriction, as Beijing has already demonstrated with gallium, germanium and rare earth elements — would cripple the renewable buildout in a way that no Gulf crisis has ever threatened the diversified global oil market. This is the geopolitical risk the authors choose not to see.

The church that cannot be wrong

What is most instructive about the Bordoff-Kaufman piece is its structural logic. Every new development — the retraction of the doomsday scenario, the limits of climate economics, the Hormuz crisis, the European heat wave — is processed through a framework that invariably produces the same output: the case for rapid climate action is strengthened rather than weakened. The retraction of RCP8.5 strengthens it, because it is claimed that the lowest-emissions scenarios are also now slipping out of reach.

The inability to accurately measure the costs of climate change is argued not to be relevant because uncertainty about catastrophic tail risks cannot be measured in any cost-benefit analysis. The Hormuz crisis strengthens it, because fossil fuel dependence is dangerous. The heat wave strengthens it, because the world is already hotter. There is no conceivable empirical development that would weaken the case. This is not science. It is a closed belief system — one that exhibits precisely the institutional resilience of a church whose theology cannot be falsified by mere observation.

Against this, it is worth recalling Jonathan Adler’s conclusion in the paper cited above: “A true ‘no regrets’ approach to climate change is not greater government controls on economic activity, but fewer. Economic growth, market institutions, and technological advance are often the most effective forms of insurance that a civilisation can have.”

The empirical record on human resilience to environmental extremes entirely supports this. The dramatic fall in weather-related mortality over the past century was not delivered by emissions controls, carbon taxes or renewable mandates. It was delivered by economic growth, infrastructure investment, better forecasting, more resilient agriculture and the kind of technological advance that only prosperous, energy-abundant societies can sustain. Imposing energy poverty in the name of climate insurance does not reduce climate risk. It destroys the adaptive capacity on which humanity’s actual track record of climate resilience depends.

Bordoff and Kaufman are intelligent people writing in good faith, and their willingness to concede that climate rhetoric has outrun the evidence is genuinely welcome. But the concession is immediately neutralised. The doomsday scenario is gone but its urgency remains. The science has been revised but the policy agenda is unchanged. One might have hoped that the formal admission of the implausibility of the RCP8.5 scenario would occasion a reckoning. Instead, we are offered a more sophisticated argument for the same conclusions.

H.L. Mencken observed that the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed — and hence clamorous to be led to safety — by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. The hobgoblin has been updated. The alarm, and the clamour to be led, remain exactly as before.

This article was first published in the Daily Sceptic https://dailysceptic.org/2026/07/03/the-death-of-climate-alarmism-has-been-greatly-exaggerated/