Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
Kim Rogalin posted about the controversy over the (now removed) 4th edition of the Federal Judicial Center’s Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence from the National Academy of Sciences.
Bradley says his points about RCP 8.5 were never directly answered, and that Climategate should not be forgotten, quoting Andrew Dessler from 2009 calling the emails “embarrassing and a public-relations disaster for science.”
The problem with that chapter centered on the fact it was not neutral or unbiased, as the science manual is supposed to be, but was written by activist lawyers and academics actively involved in climate lawsuits filed across the nation, plus plaintiffs, advisors, and climate experts participating in those trials. Being written by public advocates of climate lawsuits, while citing materials and using whole sections written by attorneys and academics testifying for the plaintiffs in those lawsuits, doesn’t just tiptoe along the line of the appearance of impropriety. It is flat-out improper and should have been sufficient by itself to disqualify the climate science document from inclusion in the FJC science manual….
The Academy did the right thing by removing the climate chapter from its website and formally investigating.
Jim Cooper Exchange
Enter Jim Cooper, Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota, who commented.
What BS. Members of National Academy of Sciences are elected based of quality of their scientific research not their political positions. Members are elected … in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. Membership is a widely accepted mark of excellence in science and is considered one of the highest honors that a scientist can receive. Current NAS membership totals approximately 2,700 members and 500 international members, of which approximately 200 have received Nobel prizes.” [NAS here]
I then engaged him as follows:
Bradley: Shame that climate science ruined the reputation of science in general. From Climategate to RCP 8.5.
Jim Cooper: No the shame is folks unwillingness to read the scientific literature . As retired scientist and Scientific Journal Editor, I know that the scientific evidence for Climate Change is robust and the quality of the research on par with other scientific fields. The exchange of personal opinions in a few emails did not affect the quality of the published research. I challenge you to prove otherwise using links to credible documentation.
Bradley: Are/were you part of the problem? Climategate was about real-time cheating for ‘the cause’ (and getting called out for it) and an admitted promise to attempt to skew peer review. Read the quotations! Secondly, what about all the journal articles based on RCP 8.5. Retraction? Climate models are not science….
Bradley: What about the busted paradigm of RCP 8.5-based peer-reviewed articles? Why did the profession turn the speculative (and now rejected) model scenario into a base case? Politicization or mass intellectual error?
Cooper: Again and again I will remind you and others that posts without links to credible domination for claims are noise. Links please, otherwise I will not respond.
Bradley: It is international news in the climate community that RCP 8.5 was formally rejected after a decade of primary use. It was the basis for literally thousands of published climate articles. Roger Pielke Jr. has covered this in detail. Are you following the debate? So again my question: “What about the busted paradigm of RCP 8.5-based peer-reviewed articles?” rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/rcp85-is-officially-dead
Conclusion
My points were never directly answered by the self-anointed authority. If I had made the same case in a journal article, providing a link, what would Cooper have said? My guess is that he would state that it was not a quality journal. Such is the narrative that the experts do not want to disturb.
Climategate lives–and should never be forgotten. As a leading climate alarmist-qua-scientist, Andrew Dessler, stated back in 2009: “There is no doubt that these emails are embarrassing and a public-relations disaster for science.”
Jim Cooper Background
In a previous Facebook post concerning the Climate Change Reality Forum, Cooper wrote:
The goal of this site is: “The Climate change reality forum is an open Facebook group established to reach people with information that differs from the IPCC’s official position on this subject.” IPCC presents scientific research findings and the only valid debate must be with scientific research findings accompanied by full citation of sources not opinions. But I find that the latter predominant thus are not honest discussions of reality.
This led to more than one hundred comments, with Cooper responding to criticism by stating:
It’s your responsibility to prove your claims using data and/or previous published research findings. That’s part of critical thinking, and I repeat in science all statements and/or claims must be backed by citation of credible documentation. Please provide a link to paper where the figure appears….
How true–except when it comes to climate science and other politicized areas of scientific research.
Only from polls where responders can claim to worry without having to pay for climate action–and not be told that their collective actions will not affect local or global climate for decades, if ever.
The pollsters might as well ask: “Do you want more or less extreme weather?” … “Do you want more or less safety?”
“Say ‘enough’ to the United Nations/IPCC/COP process. Call off the CO2 fests. Shift from mitigation (fail) to adaptation. Demote government, promote realism and civil society. And practice social justice with the new imperative: First, do no harm. That starts and ends with energy prices–no climate premium please.”
Most people sense that the planet is in deep trouble and want to do something. Welcome to the climate majority.
Climate majority? Only from polls where responders can claim to worry without having to pay for climate action–and not be told that their collective actions will not affect local or global climate for decades, if ever. The pollsters might as well ask: “Do you want more or less extreme weather?” … “Do you want more or less safety?” The fix is in.
CMP is dedicated to “effective, coordinated climate action by a broad-based coalition of citizens; from grassroots initiatives to high-level policy.”
Through grassroots and policy level organising with communities, schools [“Climate Courage Schools”] and businesses [“Regulate Us. Better.”], we are working to turn that silent majority into a self-aware one — one that is able to slow climate breakdown and prepare for the impacts that are already underway.
Freak Out?
The CMP recently stated that “Most climate scientists are quietly freaking out,”
A 2021 anonymous poll by Nature found that the vast majority of climate scientists don’t believe humanity will limit warming to 1.5°C. In fact, 60% expected temperatures to rise beyond 3.0°C — levels that mean a high risk of triggering “hothouse Earth” conditions. So it comes with no surprise that 82% of those same scientists expected to see catastrophic impacts to our civilisation in their own lifetimes. Yet almost none were saying so publicly.
Enter a new term, scientific reticence, “when being too cautious puts us at risk.”
This kind of silence has a name. James Hansen — the godfather of climate science — calls it “scientific reticence”: scientists’ tendency to hold back from stating their conclusions in full. There’s also a communication problem baked into scientific culture: researchers are trained to lead with uncertainty, even when the evidence is overwhelming. A finding with 90–95% confidence is remarkably strong but will often be communicated with ifs and buts and doubt – every caveat chips away at the message, and the public often walks away hearing cool uncertainty rather than alarm.
“Other people are waiting on scientists to take bold action on climate,” the Climate Majority Project continues.
That reticence has real consequences. Business leaders, policymakers, and civil servants often rely on scientific consensus to justify urgent action. When scientists won’t spell out how bad things truly are, it quietly removes the permission others feel they need to sound the alarm themselves.
Strange. The IPCC and mainstream media live off the “consensus” argument. And critics have responded that science is not consensus, and climate models are not science. Academic climate scientists are all-in with alarmism to demonstrate their importance as “experts” and to keep the government money flowing. Never mind Climategate or RCP 8.5. Just keep alarming and don’t dare get skeptical. The benefits of anthropogenic climate change? Don’t go there; let the skeptics do that and stick to the consensus meme.
Back to the upside down Climate Majority Project:
This matters more than it might seem. Research on climate communication consistently finds that powerful people respond strongly to direct, negative facts — more than to hopeful messaging. Frank, emotionally honest speech from scientists could itself become a tipping point, particularly when paired with visible public support for action.
Again, this seems opposite of the real world. The “negative facts” is the neo-Malthusian narrative since Paul Ehrlich in the 1960s. Doom fatigue set in a long time ago. The latest iteration–the European heat waves this summer–is not demonstrative because it is localized.
Gotta fundraise. Can’t be too negative. There is hope….
There are signs the taboo is lifting. Hansen was among the first prominent scientists to say plainly that mainstream climate action has failed. Since then, a Guardian poll of scientists, Bill McGuire’s book Hothouse Earth, and a petition signed by 1,500 climate scientists have all declared the 1.5°C target effectively dead.
Greater scientific openness could be a catalyst — for coalition-building, for mobilisation, and for giving people permission to speak honestly about what the evidence actually shows. If you are a scientist, or know a scientist, forward this message along. One of the positive things about silent majorities is that sharing messages such as this one can actually make a difference.
The Climate (non)Majority Project ends:
If you know a scientist, share this with them. One of the hopeful things about silent majorities is that the more we become aware of all the others who share our concerns, the more we can build the feeling of being part of a movement large enough to make a difference.
Or do the opposite. Say “enough” to the United Nations/IPCC/COP process. Call off the CO2 fests. Shift from mitigation (fail) to adaptation. Demote government, promote realism and civil society. And practice social justice with the new imperative: First, do no harm. That starts and ends with energy prices–no climate premium please.
“Climate science is the worst example to try to explain and defend the scientific method. But will Andrew Dessler seriously reconsider his unrealistic view of climate science in theory and practice? Climategate exposed the bias that has continued to this day.”
“Climate science is the worst example to try to explain and defend the scientific method. But will Andrew Dessler seriously reconsider his unrealistic view of climate science in theory and practice? Climategate exposed the bias that has continued to this day.”
The romantic view of government sees wise, selfless rulers implementing policy to better the common good. Never mind that many alleged market failures are government-related on close inspection, and ‘government failure’ (the political process as described by Public Choice economics) must be weighed against ‘market failure’.
Enter climate experts relying on global climate modeling. Enter Andrew Dessler, atmospheric scientist at Texas A&M University, who doubles as a climate alarmist/campaigner. “Angry Andy” has no appetite for critics of his view of settled science and impending doom short of Big Government (Big Climate Brother). [1] He knows what’s best and wants to save us from ourselves–and with an Amway look in his eye.
Andrew Dessler has fooled himself. In an attempt to capture the common sense, moral high ground, he presents the following description of good science without seriously seeing how climatology has sabotaged itself for “the cause.” [2] His bio states:
I spent 2000 as a Senior Policy Analyst in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (photo). While there, I became aware of a profound lack of understanding among policymakers and the general public about how science works and how to interpret the conflicting claims one often hears in policy debates. Based on that experience, I wrote a book that uses examples from the climate change arena to explain how science is used and misused in the policy arena.
Arguments over any scientific topic — climate change, vaccines, you name it — revolve around competing claims. For climate change, the claims are: Is the Earth warming? Are humans to blame? What will the impacts be? Over the last 150 years, the scientific community has developed a remarkably robust method for sorting out which claims are true and which aren’t. That method is what I want to walk through.
Comment: Dessler is being vague with his qualitative questions. Jumping from the human influence to “impacts” (highly negative to him) is subtle deceit.
So how does science generate knowledge? If you ask a high schooler, they’ll give you the version they learned in ninth grade: an individual scientist forms a hypothesis, runs an experiment, and draws a conclusion. That’s more or less what happens at the individual level, though in practice it’s more iterative — you design, test, and refine all at once, landing on a slightly different idea each time until you reach a conclusion about whatever hypothesis you’ve ended up with.
Comment: Dessler again hides the weenie. Climate models are far from objective when it comes to “design, test, and refine.” Models are causality deficient and not testable as is CO2 science performed under other-things-equal conditions (the greenhouse).
But this isn’t science. It’s only step one. Any individual scientist can make mistakes — scientists are human. Maybe there’s a bug in the code, maybe there’s an error in the experiment. Just because someone ran an experiment and reached a conclusion doesn’t mean it’s right, and scientists don’t treat a single result as settled truth.
Comment: Experiments? This scientific method is beyond climate models, what Dessler conveniently hides (more deceit). And what about the Climategate scientists who were the cream of the IPCC crop? Experiments under the scientific method are controlled, just the opposite of the gravy train of climate ‘science’.
Step two is peer review, the first layer of quality control. The scientist writes up what they did and submits it to a journal, which sends the paper to other experts in the field. Those experts judge whether the methods are sound, whether it properly references prior work, and whether the conclusions actually follow from the data. Ask any scientist and they’ll tell you peer review is miserable — the comments come back brutal, often harsh, and you have to revise and resubmit, sometimes multiple times, before an editor finally accepts the paper.
Comment: Peer review? Back to Climategate. “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow, even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!” – —Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit, July 8, 2004.
Peer review catches an immense amount of bad science, but it can’t catch all of it. Reviewers get sloppy or overworked, they miss obvious mistakes, and they can’t catch hidden errors — a bug in the code, a misread instrument. So a peer-reviewed paper making it into a journal doesn’t mean the paper is right. Nobody treats a single paper as the final word.
Comment: Inherent biases of researchers with a “cause” and retractions and new-replacing-old explains a lot of climate alarm. Why has ‘peer review’ failed on a variety of population and resource issues since the Paul Ehrlich heyday in the 1960s? Neo-Malthusianism has passed the review test in such publications as Science and Nature from the beginning.
That’s where step three comes in: the crucible of science. Important results get retested by the broader community. If you publish something interesting, it gets dissected. Sometimes people try to reproduce your work directly but more often they test its implications. If someone claims X is true, and that implies that Y is also true, then scientists will go check Y. If a claim survives this gauntlet long enough, it becomes accepted. That’s how we generate knowledge.
Let me give an example: the ozone hole. In 1985 — and I doubt many people watching were around then, but I remember it well — Joe Farman and his colleagues published observations from Antarctica showing that a huge chunk of ozone was disappearing every year.
Comment: Okay, give us some examples from the mainstream climate science literature. The predictions from the 1980s to the present. Oops, can’t go there. More deceit from the-fix-is-in Dessler.
Through this process, a consensus emerged. And it’s worth being clear that this consensus is organic. There’s no vote, no poll, no meeting where it gets decided. Scientists go to conferences, talk to one another, and independently arrived at the same answer. It’s the ultimate free market of ideas. After the consensus was established, the peer-reviewed literature doesn’t even mention the rival theories — it simply takes chlorine chemistry as given. That’s what a consensus looks like. It doesn’t mean every single scientist agrees, but it does mean there’s no longer any legitimate debate.
Comment: And what does this have to do with the alarmist conclusion of physical climate science? The rest of the story please.
So where can you see what scientists actually think? It’s all in the peer-reviewed literature, which contains the entire historical record of the argument: the discovery, the competing theories, the debate, the testing, and finally the community coalescing around one answer. But there’s a lot of room for misrepresentation. You can dig up an old paper claiming the ozone hole was caused by dynamics and wave it around as if there still was a debate about the cause of the ozone hole — without mentioning that the idea was disproven long ago and that even its own authors no longer believe it.
Comment: And regarding CO2 as a major negative and threat to the future of human flourishing? That is the debate.
There’s a bigger problem, though: the peer-reviewed literature is written in a language I call “nerd.” It’s extremely hard to read — honestly, some of it is hard for me to follow. It takes graduate students years to work through the literature in a single field, so we can’t expect policymakers or ordinary people to do it.
Comment: And look at the ruined reputation of climate science, based on climate models and polluted by activists (such as Dessler) who look to politics and government first.
This is where scientific assessments come in. The most famous is the IPCC — the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The job of an assessment is to read and summarize the peer-reviewed literature, synthesizing what’s settled, what’s been disproven, and what remains genuinely debated.
Comment: Sorry, but the IPCC is thoroughly politicized. As Dessler said about the IPCC Climategate gang back in 2009: “There is no doubt that these emails are embarrassing and a public-relations disaster for science.”
To ensure the assessments accurately summarize the peer-reviewed literature, assessments are written by large teams, which are far less prone to bias than individuals and which dilute the influence of any one scientist with an axe to grind. The teams are deliberately assembled to avoid stacking the deck, and the reports themselves go through multiple rounds of peer review. That rigorous process is exactly why you can trust them and why people consider the IPCC to be the gold standard of what we know about the climate system. An assessment produced through a different process may well not be credible.
Comment: “… why people consider the IPCC to be the gold standard of what we know about the climate system. An assessment produced through a different process may well not be credible.” Sorry, but outside of The Tribe (a term used by Judith Curry), consensus is not science. Qualitative relationships do not mean climate alarm–that is where the bias, tribe, and cause come in.
You can even watch the consensus evolve across assessments. Take the attribution of warming. The 1990 IPCC report said the observed warming was broadly consistent with model predictions but also comparable to natural variability — in other words, we don’t know whether humans are responsible. By 1995, it concluded that the balance of evidence suggested a discernible human influence — a sentence only a committee could write, and one that barely commits to anything. By 2001, most of the warming over the previous 50 years was judged “likely” due to greenhouse gases; by 2007, “very likely”; by 2013, “extremely likely.” The 2023 report says essentially the same as 2013 — there’s not much stronger language available.
Comment: That aside, is the human influence good or bad? Deep Ecology’s guilty-until-proven-innocent does not cut it. A simple task such as dividing the warming into max and min increases and by month would be a good start to estimate benefits and costs. Focus on that, Professor Dessler. Data trumps models, right? Government is hardly the institution of effective change.
So, to wrap up: science is our ultimate tool for deciphering the universe — the most successful method we’ve ever developed for determining what’s true and what isn’t. Our understanding is written into the peer-reviewed literature, so if you want to know what scientists think, that’s where to look. And for those of us who don’t speak nerd, scientific assessments are the Rosetta Stone — they translate nerd into English.
Comment: And the skeptics of climate alarm and forced energy transformation agree and ask for climate science to follow the scientific method, as done in the separate field of CO2 Science.
Summary
Dessler has fooled himself in his romantic view of climate science, which is one of the worst if not the worst offender of the scientific method. My major points are restated (and Dessler is invited to respond, implicitly or explicitly):
Climate modeling is at the core of physical climate science. Yet global climate reproductions are causality-deficient and not testable per the scientific method. CO2 science, conducting experiments in greenhouse (‘other things equal’) conditions is the opposite (and beneficial). Settled science? Nope. As MIT climate scientist Kerry Emanuel noted: “I actually share with [opponent] John [Christy] an inherent distrust of complicated models. I don’t like them particularly. It’s one of the necessary evils.”
The RCP 8.5 base case, which launched a thousand journal articles, has been abandoned by the climate establishment. This related to the climate modeling problem, above.
Peer review? Consider this quotation from the Climategate emails (Phil Jones, 2004): “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the literature peer-review status is in the late 2000s.” Dessler himself admitted: “There is no doubt that these emails are embarrassing and a public-relations disaster for science” (2009)].
Government funding and self-interest working in unsettled space is a recipe for pseudoscience. A climate scientist, owing to a number of factors, can simply chose to investigate the negatives of the human influence on climate rather than study the positives. And by making a convenient assumption (RCP 8.5), the worst-case scenario is presented as ‘science’.
Consensus is not science. Climate science is unsettled. MIT’s Emanuel, author of What We Know About Climate Change, remarked: “If I’d written a book called What We Don’t Know about Climate Science, it would have been an encyclopedia.”
The IPCC process has been compromised by politics between the core of the report to the Summary for Policymakers to the media interpretation of the Summary without correction by the scientific community.
Physical climate science is just the beginning. Public policy must also consider climate economics (which Dessler rejects: “In order to solve the climate problem, the first thing we need to do is ignore the economists”) and government failure alongside alleged market failure and analytic failure.
Climate science is the worst example to try to explain and defend the scientific method. But will Andrew Dessler seriously reconsider his unrealistic view of climate science in theory and practice? Climategate exposed bias that has continued to this day.
It is time for humility and a start-over. Climate alarmism is old, largely falsified, and rightfully demoted in the public eye. Realism and depoliticization can bring physical climate science back to the realm of respected science.
“If you’re pushing fossil fuels at this point, you’re anti-human.”
I find the path we’re on now — the rich world survives (if lucky), but abandons everyone else — to be morally problematic.
Hey assholes. We’ve been telling you for decades that this was going to happen if we didn’t reduce greenhouse gas emissions. You didn’t listen and now it’s all happening. We hope you’re happy. Enjoy the heatwaves, intense rainfall, sea level rise, ocean acidification, and many other things, you fucking morons.
[2] This infamous term was used by Michael Mann in a Climategate email (May 30, 2008): “I gave up on Judith Curry a while ago. I don’t know what she thinks she’s doing, but it’s not helping the cause, or her professional credibility.”
I had been unconvinced of the climate change narrative since the earliest days. When the global warming circus opened for business in the 1980s, we were just coming off the back of the alarm over the hole in the ozone layer, so a second atmospheric emergency in the space of a few years seemed just a little too much of a coincidence.
I had been unconvinced of the climate change narrative since the earliest days. When the global warming circus opened for business in the 1980s, we were just coming off the back of the alarm over the hole in the ozone layer, so a second atmospheric emergency in the space of a few years seemed just a little too much of a coincidence.
However, it was only the advent of the internet that confirmed my suspicions that climate science had a problem. I still remember dialling up on a modem – in the wee small hours, when there was more bandwidth – to visit a site called Still Waiting for Greenhouse, where the first climate sceptics used to convene. One particular story that struck a chord with me concerned a scientific assessment of warming on Australia. Computer simulations had confirmed, or so it was said, that Australia would see a dramatic increase in rainfall. However, when sceptics pointed out that this would be an unalloyed good in such a dry country, new simulations quickly appeared, overturning the previously settled science and demonstrating, no doubt conclusively, that rainfall would disappear almost entirely. Now I felt for sure that there was a problem.
It’s hard to make an empirical case that the climate is deteriorating. Hydrologists have understood for thousands of years that weather patterns change constantly. Indeed, we now know that they exhibit trends on all timescales, from hours, to years, decades, centuries, millennia and beyond. That being the case, the few decades of warming seen recently don’t look anything out of the ordinary, and other ways of frightening the populace must be found.
One of the earliest ideas market-tested by the alarmists was to try to convince the public that mankind was definitely affecting the climate – a case of ‘never mind that the weather changes naturally all the time, now humans are changing it’. In 1995, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its second assessment of the world’s climate, it claimed that it had detected “discernible human influence on global climate“, in the shape of a strong warming of the atmosphere high above the tropics. So thrilled was the media with this ‘fingerprint’ of mankind’s guilt that even the subsequent revelation that the finding fell apart if the old data used were brought up to date did nothing to dim that enthusiasm. Sceptics, on the other hand, now knew that something was badly wrong.
Buoyed by their success with the ‘fingerprint in the sky’, the IPCC’s Third Assessment went further, trying to convince the public that the world was hotter than it had ever been before, or at least that it was hotter than the Medieval Warm Period, a staple of sceptic objections to the global warming narrative. Climate science’s poster child to do this was the Hockey Stick graph, a now infamous scientific concoction representing Northern Hemisphere temperatures for the last 800 years. For most of that period, there had apparently been a steady cooling, but then, at the dawn of the 20th century, there was a sudden switch to warming, with unprecedented levels reached by the 1980s.
The IPCC clearly saw the graph as a weapon, placing it front and centre in the Third Assessment Report and in the press conference that launched it. It went on to become an icon of the global warming movement – apparently incontrovertible evidence that mankind was wrecking the planet.
But if the rise of the Hockey Stick was spectacular, the fall from grace of the graph itself and of the scientist behind it, one Professor Michael Mann, was just as extraordinary. The tale has been told elsewhere, but for our purposes suffice it to say that through years of doggedly determined research, two Canadians – retired mining engineer Steve McIntyre and economist Ross McKitrick – revealed that the hockey stick shape of the final graph was a function of data that was entirely spurious – comically so – and an invalid statistical analysis.
But more important than the fact of shattering of the IPCC’s icon was the reaction of the scientific community – not just those directly involved in climatic research, but those who might have brought relevant expertise from other fields, and also those working in scientific publishing and institutions. Nobody but nobody, it seemed, dared to criticise the Hockey Stick or indeed to accept that it was flawed. Indeed, the reaction was exactly the opposite – to circle the wagons and to insist that the graph was valid, and that McIntyre and McKitrick had nefarious motivations. This was no easy task. So daft were the data behind Mann’s results and so catastrophic his calculations, the scientific establishment was reduced to making the ludicrous argument that despite these obvious failings, he had still reached the correct answer.
The failure of scientists to speak out about the Hockey Stick would have appeared strange to many, but not to those familiar with the ways of climate scientists. It had long been clear that anything other than total support for the narrative of catastrophic global warming was considered taboo in scientific circles. Just how little deviation from orthodoxy was considered acceptable, and just how strong a grip the climate mafia’s omertà had on those making a living in the field became clear in a 2008 statement by Joanne Simpson, a pioneer of the field, issued shortly after her retirement:
Since I am no longer affiliated with any organisation nor receiving any funding, I can speak quite frankly. … The main basis of the claim that man’s release of greenhouse gases is the cause of the warming is based almost entirely upon climate models.
That she had been too scared to say something so mild while working for the US government speaks volumes.
Another scientist, Roger Pielke Jr., who was committed to the idea of manmade climate change but who had the temerity to point out that there was no sign of it in the data on hurricanes, found himself moved from the large comfortable office he had previously enjoyed into a windowless cupboard, And then, when he failed to take the hint, found even that filled with a growing pile of junk-filled boxes. As the eminent hydrologist Demetris Koutsoyiannis explained, “diversity in scientific opinion is now strictly prohibited”, or, as another wag put it: “The opposite of diversity is university.”
Any lingering doubts that climate science was utterly corrupt should have been put to bed by then, and if they hadn’t, events at the end of 2009 would have sealed the deal. On the eve of the Green Blob’s annual climate conference, thousands of emails between some of the world’s most prominent climatologists, including the team behind the Hockey Stick, were leaked onto the internet. Climategate, as the affair was dubbed, revealed the depths to which the field had sunk: nobbling of journals, silencing of critics, fixing data to give desired answers – it went on and on. In one extraordinary email, it was suggested that everyone in climate science knew the Hockey Stick was baloney. In another, a climatologist asked “What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multidecadal natural fluctuation? They’ll kill us probably.” These were extraordinary revelations at a time when the world was being told that Mann’s work had received a clean bill of health and that the science of climate change was ‘settled’.
The world was scandalised; so much so that, for a few short months at least, sceptic voices were occasionally heard in the media. But then the scientific and bureaucratic establishments closed ranks and a systematic coverup began. No fewer than six inquiries were set up, on both sides of the Atlantic, and by dint of careful selection of panel members (no known sceptics), tight control over what was examined (nothing that had been criticised) and an absolute refusal to take evidence from those, like Mcintyre and McKitrick, who had been the chief critics of the Hockey Stick, all managed to reach roughly the same conclusion – ‘Nothing to see here, move along’.
The idea of manmade global warming may have started as real science, but the field was quickly overwhelmed by other forces. Scientists saw the arguments for climate catastrophe as delivering funding beyond their wildest dreams. Politicians saw it as a way to manipulate electorates and deliver power and wealth, as the rags to riches story of Al Gore makes clear. Their chief weapon in this regard was a fearful narrative of climate disaster, but as it was deployed more frequently and the predictions became more frightening, its progenitor lost control. It took on a life of its own, becoming in essence the foundation of a secular religion – a cult, in other words – complete with ‘holy’ texts, red-robed Extinction Rebellion priests and a girl prophetess in the shape of Greta Thunberg.
It’s hard to express how dangerous this is for our society. Cult members respond to primeval emotions, their thought processes bypassing the rational mind entirely. Driven by fear of cataclysm and in pursuit of redemption, they can and will inflict astonishing cruelty on others. Think the Spanish Inquisition, think Mao, Pol Pot and the Nazis.
Cults can and will corrupt institutions, civic, political, legal and scientific. My friend Professor Michael Kelly has tried for many years to get the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering – he is a fellow of both – to hold meetings on climate science and Net Zero that challenge the current ‘consensus’, but has been blanked at every step. These bodies, along with all the other scientific institutions, now seek to further the interests of the cult rather than science.
The media have mostly been corrupted too. Most outlets have long since banned sceptics from their output. The BBC even convened a seminar of what it said were “leading scientists” to justify the policy, but were left looking corrupt when internet sleuths uncovered the names of those in attendance, almost all of whom were environmental activists. There is barely even a pretence of even-handedness in most of the media. I recently asked the magazine of the Institute of Civil Engineers if I could write an op-ed responding to a piece it had published criticising Kemi Badenoch’s new-found scepticism about the feasibility of Net Zero. The response was that the editors would be pleased to have an article discussing how Net Zero might be delivered more cheaply, but that they would not countenance anything that questioned the wisdom of the target. The legendary physicist Richard Feynman once said he’d rather have questions that couldn’t be answered than answers that couldn’t be questioned. I agree, and Net Zero is clearly an example of the latter.
The Civil Service is entirely in the grip of the climate cult too. I have spent years trying to get Whitehall to correct its preposterous statements about the cost of renewables. But despite the existence of hard data refuting their claims, both ministers and officials simply blank any such demand. It’s as if they think their feelings about the climate outweigh any concerns about data, facts and the truth.
If a cult is what we are facing, we need to understand the threat it represents. A historical example gives a flavour of what we might expect. In South Africa in 1856 the Xhosa tribe fell into the grip of a cult led by a charismatic girl called Nongqawuse: the Greta Thunberg of her day. She persuaded the elders that if they slaughtered the cattle herds that were the basis of the economy and burnt down the granaries, everything would be miraculously reincarnated: ‘new people’ would come with ‘new cattle’. Suffice it to say this didn’t end well. Closer to our time, the murderous excesses of communist and fascist societies can be seen as a manifestation of the same phenomenon. Ed Miliband’s idea, aired as I write, of installing small wind turbines across the country is painfully reminiscent of the backyard steel furnaces installed during China’s perversely misnamed ‘Great Leap Forward’, a bid to collectivise agriculture and industrialise society in the space of just a few short years, after a cult had formed around the country’s revolutionary leader Mao Tse-tung. Millions died before more rational actors gained the upper hand again.
For years, I couldn’t understand why society appeared to have lost its collective mind. Why were we throwing away our cheap and reliable energy sources in favour of windmills and solar panels? It was surely madness. But now I know: climate science and climate politics have become corrupt, and together have unleashed a cult, infecting society with irrationality and silencing everyone who tries to stand against it. The results are plain to see. As our economy sinks ever further into the mire, and as Mr Miliband pushes ever harder to make sure it sinks entirely, we should be very worried. But at least we know that, as and when the lights go out, we can point the finger at the climate scientists who started us down this road.
Andrew Montford is the Director of Net Zero Watch and author of The Hockey Stick Illusion, a history of the rise and fall of the infamous climate graph.
When it comes to the climate debate, Paul R. Ehrlich joins Climategate as a major reason to reject alarmism. And who other than Michael “Climategate” Mann praised Paul “False Alarm” Ehrlich.
“Perhaps the most serious flaw in [The Population Bomb (1968)] was that it was much too optimistic about the future…. Signs of potential collapse, environmental and political, seem to be growing.” – Paul and Anne Ehrlich, Betrayal of Science and Reason (1996).
“Very sad news. Paul was a friend and a hero. He will be greatly missed.” – Professor Michael E. Mann, X
When it comes to the climate debate, Paul R. Ehrlich joins Climategate as a major reason to reject alarmism. And who other than Michael “Climategate” Mann praised Paul “False Alarm” Ehrlich.
The Sierra Club and other mainstream environmental groups could not muster the courage to RIP one of their own. The New York Timesobituary had to focus on the famous false alarms. But not Michael Mann. Ehrlich and Mann are two peas in the neo-Malthusian pod.
Letter-to-the-Editor Exchange
Regarding the look-back at Paul Ehrlich’s predictions, I challenged this published letter-to-the-editor as follows (WSJ, March 14, 2026).
Jason L. Riley overstates his premise in “Paul Ehrlich Was Always Wrong, Never in Doubt” (Upward Mobility, March 18). Ehrlich and his wife Anne (who helped write his 1968 book, “The Population Bomb”) later regretted the use of theoretical scenarios to illustrate their view of the future. Even though they included in the book the warning that “we can be sure that none of them will come true as stated,” the scenarios became tools of critics. Their book may be wrong on some issues, but it is hard to dispute that the earth has finite natural resources, limited human carrying capacity and that excessive growth has resulted in environmental destruction.
I responded with this (submitted, not published) letter:
Professor Thomas J. Straka’s defense of Paul Ehrlich (LTE, March 24) falls short. Ehrlich never waffled on his doom scenarios despite his throw-away line, “we can be sure that none of them will come true as stated.” In a 2018 interview, Ehrlich proclaimed that societal collapse in the next few decades was a “near certainty.” In his 1996 book, Ehrlich doubled down: “Perhaps the most serious flaw in [The Population Bomb (1968)] was that it was much too optimistic about the future…. Signs of potential collapse, environmental and political, seem to be growing.”
Straka’s statement that “it is hard to dispute that the earth has finite natural resources, limited carrying capacity and that excessive growth has resulted in environmental destruction” neglects that human ingenuity, the ultimate resource,. has reversed the so-called limits to growth. The two-thirds improvement in U.S. air quality since the early 1970s speaks to what Julian Simon stated in his final public lecture in 1997: “more people, greater wealth, expanded resources, cleaner environment.”
Paul Ehrlich (1932–2026) is dead; Julian Simon (1932–1998) lives.
Climate change presents many threats to life on our planet: a worsening global food crisis, extreme heat that could lead to millions of deaths, intense droughts, floods and the collapse of crucial ecosystems. Some island countries and cities might disappear beneath rising seas. Conflict, state failure and mass migration could escalate.
Policymakers and citizens are aware of some of these risks, but not necessarily how severe they will be, how rapidly they might emerge or which risks are avoidable. Government leaders need to know the severity and urgency of such risks to help them to make well-informed decisions and set priorities. So far, they have only a partial view.
For example, policymakers might realize that sea-level rise requires spending more money on flood defences, yet neglect the possibility that parts of large cities such as London, New York City or Mumbai might have to be abandoned (see ‘London flooded by rising seas’). They might be aware that more people will die in heatwaves in a hotter climate, yet be unprepared for mass casualties if tens of thousands in one region were to die in conditions exceeding the limits of human tolerance.
…
Reflecting wide perspectives. The broad nature of risk assessments means that they are hard to produce. First, they are interdisciplinary. For example, the expertise necessary to identify an impact threshold relevant to a society (such as mass casualties in a city from extreme heat; see ‘Intolerable heat stress’ and ‘Boiling in Belém’), which requires socio-economic and health data, differs from that needed to assess the likelihood of crossing that threshold, which requires climate-modelling information. Experts and practitioners from different fields must thus work together.
It’s kind of sad seeing scientists in this situation.
Before I read the Climategate emails, I thought they were all frauds, but after reading Climategate I came to realise many, possibly all of them actually believe the nonsense they are peddling. Climategate is full of activist scientists acting to suppress contrary evidence, not as part of a conspiracy to deceive, but because they believe their mission to save the world is so important, nothing can be allowed into the public domain which might create doubt.
Now the world has moved on, and climate action is no longer a priority, climate scientists are still trying to fight a battle which has been lost, a cause which other people increasingly find irrelevant and implausible. If it wasn’t for all the damage their nonsense climate warnings did to the world economy, all the lives blighted or cut short by soaring energy prices, I would feel a little sorry for them.
On the 16th anniversary of Climategate, an editorial from 2010 by the late Patrick J. Michaels, is as timely as ever. Michaels, the most trenchant climate scientist against the alarmist consensus, would be pleased with the demise of the Paris Agreement and ‘Net Zero’ at this year’s COP30. His editorial published in the Wall Street Journal (July 12, 2010) follows.
“It’s impossible to find anything wrong if you really aren’t looking…. [Sir Muir Russell’s committee] only interviewed CRU people, not the people whom they had trashed.” (Patrick Michaels, below)
On the 16th anniversary of Climategate, an editorial from 2010 by the late Patrick J. Michaels, is as timely as ever. Michaels, the most trenchant climate scientist against the alarmist consensus, would be pleased with the demise of the Paris Agreement and ‘Net Zero’ at this year’s COP30. His editorial published in the Wall Street Journal (July 12, 2010) follows.
Global warming alarmists claim vindication after last year’s data manipulation scandal. Don’t believe the ‘independent’ reviews.
Last November there was a world-wide outcry when a trove of emails were released suggesting some of the world’s leading climate scientists engaged in professional misconduct, data manipulation and jiggering of both the scientific literature and climatic data to paint what scientist Keith Briffa called “a nice, tidy story” of climate history. The scandal became known as Climategate.
Now a supposedly independent review of the evidence says, in effect, “nothing to see here.” Last week “The Independent Climate Change E‑mails Review,” commissioned and paid for by the University of East Anglia, exonerated the University of East Anglia. The review committee was chaired by Sir Muir Russell, former vice chancellor at the University of Glasgow.
Mr. Russell took pains to present his committee, which consisted of four other academics, as independent. He told the Times of London that “Given the nature of the allegations it is right that someone who has no links to either the university or the climate science community looks at the evidence and makes recommendations based on what they find.”
No links? One of the panel’s four members, Prof. Geoffrey Boulton, was on the faculty of East Anglia’s School of Environmental Sciences for 18 years. At the beginning of his tenure, the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) — the source of the Climategate emails — was established in Mr. Boulton’s school at East Anglia. Last December, Mr. Boulton signed a petition declaring that the scientists who established the global climate records at East Anglia “adhere to the highest levels of professional integrity.”
This purportedly independent review comes on the heels of two others — one by the University of East Anglia itself and the other by Penn State University, both completed in the spring, concerning its own employee, Prof. Michael Mann. Mr. Mann was one of the Climategate principals who proposed a plan, which was clearly laid out in emails whose veracity Mr. Mann has not challenged, to destroy a scientific journal that dared to publish three papers with which he and his East Anglia friends disagreed. These two reviews also saw no evil. For example, Penn State “determined that Dr. Michael E. Mann did not engage in, nor did he participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community.”
Readers of both earlier reports need to know that both institutions receive tens of millions in federal global warming research funding (which can be confirmed by perusing the grant histories of Messrs. Jones or Mann, compiled from public sources, that are available online at freerepublic.com). Any admission of substantial scientific misbehavior would likely result in a significant loss of funding.
It’s impossible to find anything wrong if you really aren’t looking. In a famous email of May 29, 2008, Phil Jones, director of East Anglia’s CRU, wrote to Mr. Mann, under the subject line “IPCC & FOI,” “Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith [Briffa] re AR4 [the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report]? Keith will do likewise … can you also email Gene [Wahl, an employee of the U.S. Department of Commerce] to do the same … We will be getting Caspar [Amman, of the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research] to do likewise.”
Mr. Jones emailed later that he had “deleted loads of emails” so that anyone who might bring a Freedom of Information Act request would get very little. According to New Scientist writer Fred Pearce, “Russell and his team never asked Jones or his colleagues whether they had actually done this.”
The Russell report states that “On the allegation of withholding temperature data, we find that the CRU was not in a position to withhold access to such data.” Really? Here’s what CRU director Jones wrote to Australian scientist Warrick Hughes in February 2005: “We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it[?]”
Then there’s the problem of interference with peer review in the scientific literature. Here too Mr. Russell could find no wrong: “On the allegations that there was subversion of the peer review or editorial process, we find no evidence to substantiate this.”
Really? Mr. Mann claims that temperatures roughly 800 years ago, in what has been referred to as the Medieval Warm Period, were not as warm as those measured recently. This is important because if modern temperatures are not unusual, it casts doubt on the fear that global warming is a serious threat. In 2003, Willie Soon of the Smithsonian Institution and Sallie Baliunas of Harvard published a paper in the journal Climate Research that took exception to Mr. Mann’s work, work which also was at variance with a large number of independent studies of paleoclimate. So it would seem the Soon-Baliunas paper was just part of the normal to-and-fro of science.
But Mr. Jones wrote Mr. Mann on March 11, 2003, that “I’ll be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor,” Chris de Freitas of the University of Auckland. Mr. Mann responded to Mr. Jones on the same day: “I think we should stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues … to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board.”
Mr. Mann ultimately wrote to Mr. Jones on July 11, 2003, that “I think the community should … terminate its involvement with this journal at all levels … and leave it to wither away into oblivion and disrepute.”
Climate Research and several other journals have stopped accepting anything that substantially challenges the received wisdom on global warming perpetuated by the CRU. I have had four perfectly good manuscripts rejected out of hand since the CRU shenanigans, and I’m hardly the only one. Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama, Huntsville, has noted that it’s becoming nearly impossible to publish anything on global warming that’s nonalarmist in peer-reviewed journals.
Of course, Mr. Russell didn’t look to see if the ugly pressure tactics discussed in the Climategate emails had any consequences. That’s because they only interviewed CRU people, not the people whom they had trashed.
Today’s decision by the Environmental Protection Agency to remove the Carbon Dioxide Endangerment Finding represents a pivotal shift in America’s approach to climate policy—one rooted in evidence, not ideology. For years, this “finding” has served as the legal justification for an array of costly, far-reaching regulations targeting everything from our nation’s power plants to the cars we drive and the energy bills we pay. Its removal is a direct response to mounting evidence that the basis for this rule was always more about speculative modeling and political maneuvering than sound science.
Today’s decision by the Environmental Protection Agency to remove the Carbon Dioxide Endangerment Finding represents a pivotal shift in America’s approach to climate policy—one rooted in evidence, not ideology. For years, this “finding” has served as the legal justification for an array of costly, far-reaching regulations targeting everything from our nation’s power plants to the cars we drive, and the energy bills we pay. Its removal is a direct response to mounting evidence that the basis for this rule was always more about speculative modeling and political maneuvering than sound science. Watch the announcement here:
The Carbon Dioxide Endangerment Finding, first enacted in 2009, rested on claims that rising levels of CO2 posed a dire threat to public health and welfare. These claims, trumpeted by alarmist voices in the media and bureaucracy, relied heavily on computer models that have since proven to be chronically inaccurate, consistently forecasting more warming than actually observed. In the years since, we’ve witnessed a remarkable gap between dire projections and reality: global temperatures have not followed the “runaway” path predicted, and extreme weather events—despite breathless coverage—remain well within the range of historical variability.
Yet while the U.S. was tying itself in regulatory knots, China and other major emitters continued to expand their coal-fired power generation, wiping out any hypothetical benefit of America’s self-imposed restrictions. According to multiple independent sources, China has increased its annual CO2 emissions by over 70% since 2005 and now burns more coal than the rest of the world combined. The idea that the U.S. could “lead by example” and coax the rest of the world into similar sacrifices has been thoroughly debunked by the facts on the ground.
The real-world effects of the Endangerment Finding were felt not in the climate, but in American households and businesses. Energy prices rose, manufacturing jobs fled overseas, and everyday citizens bore the burden of expensive, symbolic gestures that did nothing to alter the climate trajectory. The American people deserve policies that produce measurable results, not more of the same costly theater.
By removing the Endangerment Finding, the EPA is signaling a long-overdue return to rational, evidence-based policy. This action acknowledges that CO2 is not a pollutant in any meaningful scientific sense but a fundamental component of life on Earth—one that, at current atmospheric concentrations, has proven benefits for plant growth and agriculture. The change is not about neglecting environmental stewardship; rather, it’s about discarding unproductive policies and focusing on real solutions grounded in evidence, innovation, and economic reality.
The Role of WUWT and Climate Skeptics Over the Past 25 Years to Reach This Point
Today’s announcement did not happen in a vacuum. It is, in many respects, a testament to the perseverance and integrity of climate skeptics who have spent decades challenging the so-called “consensus.” For over 25 years, voices from outside the mainstream—scientists, meteorologists, engineers, and informed citizens—have raised legitimate questions about the certainty and direction of climate science and the wisdom of policies derived from it.
Watts Up With That (WUWT), which I founded in 2006, has played a key role in this effort. WUWT has provided a public platform for data-driven scrutiny, extended quotes from source material, and open debate on climate claims that were often presented as “settled science.” Over the years, millions of readers have turned to WUWT as a resource for honest analysis and transparent discussion, rather than alarmist dogma and political posturing. Through its detailed posts and vigorous comment sections, WUWT has empowered a generation of climate realists to ask tough questions, demand accountability, and resist the intimidation tactics of those invested in the status quo.
Perhaps nothing better illustrates the necessity of this skepticism than the Climategate scandal of 2009, where a trove of emails from prominent climate scientists exposed a charade disguised as science. The communications revealed attempts to manipulate data, suppress dissenting views, and stonewall requests for transparency—all in the service of defending a narrative rather than advancing understanding. Climategate confirmed what many skeptics had long suspected: that the so-called consensus was enforced through politics, not evidence, and that open inquiry was often treated as a threat rather than a requirement of science.
From the outset, climate skeptics were dismissed as “deniers” and painted as outliers, even as they brought forth data and analysis that contradicted the doomsday narratives dominating headlines. They questioned the overreliance on models with poor track records, the manipulation and cherry-picking of temperature datasets, the politicization of research funding, and the relentless conflation of weather with climate. These challenges were often met not with scientific debate but with ad hominem attacks and attempts to silence dissent.
Yet it is precisely this skepticism—this refusal to bow to groupthink—that has preserved scientific integrity and prevented far worse policy mistakes. The tireless work of independent analysts, bloggers, and organizations like The Heartland Institute has revealed errors in climate data handling, exposed conflicts of interest, and demanded transparency in the review and publication of climate research. Skeptics have consistently pointed out that climate is an immensely complex, poorly understood system, not a simple machine governed by one trace gas.
Over time, many of the arguments made by skeptics have proven prescient. The failure of climate models to accurately predict temperature trends, the non-materialization of the “hockey stick” catastrophe, the persistent downward adjustments to estimates of climate sensitivity to CO2—these have all vindicated a more cautious, critical approach to climate science. Importantly, the skeptical community’s insistence on open data and reproducibility has forced a grudging shift toward greater transparency in mainstream climate research.
Today, as the EPA walks back one of the foundational rules of American climate policy, the importance of these skeptical voices can no longer be ignored. Policymakers are beginning to realize that real progress requires confronting inconvenient facts, not suppressing them. The narrative has shifted from unquestioning acceptance of alarmist predictions to a more mature, data-driven conversation about climate and energy. The very arguments once ridiculed as “fringe” are now being echoed in the halls of government and public policy.
None of this would have been possible without those who dared to speak up and challenge the narrative, often at great personal and professional cost. I am proud to be one of the many who stood up and actively worked against it. I am thankful for the words of encouragement and the pledges of support to WUWT through donations and subscriptions, plus the support of generous private donors (you know who you are) that allowed us to continue the fight. The removal of the Endangerment Finding is, in many ways, a victory for those who believe in scientific rigor, open debate, and policies that serve the public interest—not just political expediency.
As we move forward, it’s crucial to remember that skepticism is not the enemy of science; it is its engine. Only through open inquiry, constant questioning, and a willingness to confront dogma can we ensure that climate policy remains grounded in reality and truly serves the nation’s needs.
I will have a follow-up post for tomorrow. For now, Charles and I are taking the rest of the day off.We’ve earned it– Anthony
Oh, one last thing; a personal message to Dr. Michael Mann:
Let’s not mince words: What’s been unearthed in this Fox News exposé “Unearthed chat sheds light on cozy ties between judges, climate activists, raising ethical concerns” is nothing less than a blueprint for how climate activists have sought to quietly “capture” the American judiciary, in a style remarkably reminiscent of the infamous Climategate affair of 2009, which we first broke here on this very website.
Let’s not mince words: What’s been unearthed in this Fox News exposé “Unearthed chat sheds light on cozy ties between judges, climate activists, raising ethical concerns” is nothing less than a blueprint for how climate activists have sought to quietly “capture” the American judiciary, in a style remarkably reminiscent of the infamous Climategate affair of 2009, which we first broke here on this very website. If Climategate was the exposure of insular groupthink, manipulation, and data gatekeeping in the scientific community, what we’re seeing here is the systematic application of those tactics—this time, targeting the judges who ultimately decide climate-related lawsuits.
At the center of this latest scandal is the Climate Judiciary Project (CJP), an initiative launched in 2018 by the Environmental Law Institute (ELI)—itself a left-wing nonprofit flush with activist funding, some of it allegedly traceable to China. CJP’s mission? To provide what it calls “authoritative, objective, and trusted education on climate science, the impacts of climate change, and the ways climate science is arising in the law.” What this means in practice is quietly coaching judges on the “consensus” climate narrative, prepping them to be more sympathetic to creative activist litigation—then, lo and behold, those very same funders bankroll the lawsuits that land before these freshly-indoctrinated judges.
As Senator Ted Cruz aptly put it: “This is like paying the players to play and paying the umpire to call the shots the way you want”.
The article lays out the mechanics: in September 2022, CJP launched a “listserv”—an email group with direct, ongoing communication between CJP leaders and judges nationwide. By July 2024, there were 29 members, including at least five sitting judges. The forum, innocuously called “Judicial Leaders in Climate Science,” included private sharing of climate lawsuits, congratulatory messages for activist wins, and guidance for other judges on how to run similar programs in their states.
One Delaware judge even posted a private YouTube link to a presentation giddily predicting climate lawsuits could one day bankrupt the fuel industry, with the explicit warning: “Please do not forward or use without checking with me. I suspect that goes without saying, but the powers that be will be happier that I said it.” The closed-door, chummy dynamic is obvious—and telling.
This is nothing more than indoctrination masquerading as education. CJP and its defenders, of course, insist their purpose is purely educational and objective. They claim their curriculum is “fact-based and science-first, grounded in consensus reports and developed with a robust peer review process”. But let’s be real: what’s passed off as neutral “climate education” is heavily slanted to reinforce a specific worldview, presenting worst-case climate scenarios as settled science, and framing any dissent or nuance as heresy. The program even encouraged judges to go through CJP’s prepackaged “Climate Science 101” and “Climate Litigation 101” courses, and send feedback to help make them even more effective.
There’s a distinctly unseemly aspect here: the very people training the judges are often also involved in crafting and arguing the lawsuits that appear before those same judges. The ELI and CJP’s “experts” include university professors and lawyers who have filed numerous amicus briefs in climate litigation. The potential for bias isn’t just present—it’s the entire point.
Let’s not sugarcoat it: what we’re witnessing is an effort to purchase not just favorable coverage in the press or within academia, but to buy the rulebook and the referees themselves. In the wake of Climategate, we saw how a tight circle of activists could warp the scientific process by excluding dissenting voices and manufacturing consensus. Now, the same techniques—gatekeeping, narrative control, the selective sharing of “evidence”—are being applied in a backdoor campaign to ensure judges are only exposed to the “right” sort of climate science and litigation logic.
It’s a method that could be described as “judicial capture,” and Senator Cruz was absolutely correct to raise alarm bells. The CJP’s program, far from being an innocuous continuing education effort, is a systematic campaign to get judges to “set aside the rule of law, and rule instead according to a predetermined political narrative”.
The parallels to Climategate are striking:
Secrecy: Both scandals relied on private communication channels—email servers, listservs, or “chats” out of public view.
Consensus Enforcement: Dissenting voices are shunned, and only the party line is reinforced.
Manipulation of Process: In Climategate, it was peer review and grant allocation; here, it’s the judicial training process.
Downplaying of Bias: In both cases, organizers insist their motives are objective, but the outcomes and incentives are plainly not.
The article highlights that even some judges expressed unease at the ethical implications. Back in 2019, a federal judge who hit “reply all” to an ELI climate seminar invite was chastised by colleagues, some of whom considered it an ethics violation. Others, predictably, said there was nothing to see here. But as Heritage Foundation senior legal fellow Zack Smith points out, the trend of “educating” judges on hot-button issues they will later preside over is, in itself, an invitation to bias and a violation of impartiality.
And this isn’t happening in a vacuum. The surge in climate litigation over the past several years—including multimillion-dollar lawsuits against oil companies and federal agencies—has coincided with the CJP’s ramped-up training and networking among judges. The timing is no coincidence.
The CJP claims its curriculum is developed with “robust peer review” and “meets the highest scholarly standards.” Where have we heard this before? The same line of bullshit was used to defend the emails and manipulations unearthed in Climategate—right up until it became clear that the process was anything but open and objective.
The reality is that so-called “consensus science” on climate change is precisely what is being weaponized here. The CJP’s material leans heavily on government reports that emphasize “impacts of climate change are being felt throughout all regions of the United States, and these impacts are expected to worsen with every fraction of a degree of additional warming”—ignoring the massive uncertainties, the role of natural variability, and the checkered history of failed predictions.
Why does this matter? Because, just as with Climategate, when process is corrupted and objectivity is lost, the damage ripples far beyond a single forum or group chat. Judicial decisions informed by activist “training” can result in massive financial penalties, policy overreach, and the further erosion of public trust in both science and the courts. And it’s always done under the guise of saving the planet—no matter the economic or human cost.
The secretive networking exposed by Fox News is not an isolated slip-up; it’s a feature, not a bug, of the activist playbook. When the same group of climate partisans can train the judges, coordinate the lawsuits, and then claim neutrality all the while, we have gone far beyond the realm of legitimate policy debate. This is judicial capture by stealth.
If Climategate taught us anything, it’s that sunlight remains the best disinfectant. Only by exposing these networks and demanding transparency can we hope to restore some semblance of integrity to both climate science and the courts.
Let’s call it what it is: not education, but indoctrination—an attempt to buy the judiciary, one closed-door “training” at a time.
Windmills cause cancer. They’re killing birds and whales. Electric vehicles don’t work. Have you heard about the electric sharks? Climate changeis a hoax. There are many things Donald Trump has said about climate change and renewable energy that are difficult to make sense of, but Trump’s newest line on climate change is both dumbfounding and truly dangerous: He is now determined to convince the world that climate change is a good thing.
Trump has certainly downplayed the effects of climate change in the past. He’s claimed rising sea levels will create more beachfront property, which would seem to be a misunderstanding of how land works. He’s talkedabout how people would actually be happy if it was a little warmer outside. Even Trump adviser Elon Musk, who runs an EV company, has downplayedthe threat of climate change in recent months.
Now, Trump is aiming to use the power of the federal government to reframe climate change as something that will benefit humanity.
…
“It’s so outrageous that no one except [Trump] would try to do this,” says Edward Maibach, director of George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication. “In America, anyone is free to call devastating storms, floods, droughts, air pollution, killer heatwaves, and a growing threat of mosquito- and tick-borne diseases a good thing. But saying it doesn’t make it true.”
Here is what the IPCC has to say about extreme weather – from Chapter 11 of AR6, the latest official IPCC report.
Extreme Storms, Including Tropical Cyclones
The average and maximum rain rates associated with tropical cyclones (TCs), extratropical cyclones and atmospheric rivers across the globe, and severe convective storms in some regions, increase in a warming world (high confidence) . Available event attribution studies of observed strong TCs provide medium confidence for a human contribution to extreme TC rainfall. Peak TC rain rates increase with local warming at least at the rate of mean water vapour increase over oceans (about 7% per 1°C of warming) and in some cases exceeding this rate due to increased low-level moisture convergence caused by increases in TC wind intensity (medium confidence). {11.7, 11.4, Box 11.1}
It islikely that the global proportion of Category 3–5 tropical cyclone instances2has increased over the past four decades. The average location where TCs reach their peak wind intensity has very likely migrated poleward in the western North Pacific Ocean since the 1940s, and TC translation speed has likely slowed over the conterminous USA since 1900. Evidence of similar trends in other regions is not robust. The global frequency of TC rapid intensification events has likely increased over the past four decades. None of these changes can be explained by natural variability alone (medium confidence).
The proportion of intense TCs, average peak TC wind speeds, and peak wind speeds of the most intense TCs will increase on the global scale with increasing global warming (high confidence). The total global frequency of TC formation will decrease or remain unchanged with increasing global warming (medium confidence). {11.7.1}
There is low confidence in past changes of maximum wind speeds and other measures of dynamical intensity of extratropical cyclones. Future wind speed changes are expected to be small, although poleward shifts in the storm tracks could lead to substantial changes in extreme wind speeds in some regions (medium confidence). There is low confidence in past trends in characteristics of severe convective storms, such as hail and severe winds, beyond an increase in precipitation rates. The frequency of spring severe convective storms is projected to increase in the USA, leading to a lengthening of the severe convective storm season (medium confidence); evidence in other regions is limited. {11.7.2, 11.7.3}.
Before you get too concerned about all these “medium confidence” assertions, there is a lovely climategate email where scientists explain what they actually mean by “Medium confidence”. “Medium confidence” is a replacement for “inconclusive”.
Climategate Email 0967041809.txt
…
To: Thomas Stocker [redacted]
cc: [redacted]
Subject: Re: THC collapse
Hello all. I appreciate the improvement in the table from WG 1, particularly the inclusion of symmetrical confidence levels–but please get rid of the ridiculous “inconclusive” for the .34 to .66 subjective probability range. It will convey a completely differnt meaning to lay persons–read decisionmakers–since that probability range represents medium levels of confidence, not rare events. A phrase like “quite possible” is closer to popular lexicon, but inconclusive applies as well to very likely or very unlikely events and is undoubtedly going to be misinterpreted on the outside. I also appreciate the addition of increasing huricane intensities with warming moving out of the catch all less than .66 category it was in the SOD.
…
With the aid of this Climategate gobbledygook translation, we know that “medium confidence” in IPCC speak means “inconclusive”. Given the number of “medium confidence” claims in the IPCC quote above, I think we can reasonably conclude claims climate change is causing extreme weather are not supported by the evidence.
As for claims climate change will increase mosquito borne disease, this is such an absurdity I’m surprised scientists still have the effrontery to keep making this claim. Anyone who has ever visited the far North will have observed first hand that mosquitoes don’t need a tropical climate to thrive. Those far Northern mosquitoes are just as capable of carrying mosquito borne diseases like Malaria as their tropical cousins.
And of course, there is robust counter evidence to food scare narratives in the form of skyrocketing food crop yields.
The saddest part of this for me, as a kid I once thought Rolling Stone was a media group which stood for something.
I think it’s safe to say I no longer believe this – the Rolling Stone article I quoted in my opinion is an especially substandard piece of lazy journalism.
The Rolling Stone journalist made no evidence to research reasons why Trump might be right about global warming. The journalist made no attempt to research the history of diseases like Malaria, how mosquito borne diseases used to be the scourge Britain, and even far Northern countries like Sweden – definitely NOT a disease which needs a tropical climate to thrive. As a bonus, the journalist could have asked a few questions to the quoted scientists about why if global warming is so bad, agricultural yields are skyrocketing – and whether the scientists could put a date on when if ever they expect this to change.
You must be logged in to post a comment.