Sanity Returns to Climate Debate
Sanity has returned to the climate debate – much to the sorrow of devout climatistas.
“Climatista” – a pejorative neologism applied to radical climate alarmists, activists, grifters, academics, media, and politicians who foolishly, greedily or cynically reject socioeconomic priorities to emotionally, intrinsically or politically profit from expensive, impractical climate “mitigation” schemes.
Recently betrayed by certain resources whose “work” they once exploited to justify and defend their apocalyptic, quasi-religious ideology, climatistas lost moral – and political – authority when allies at the United Nations and the New York Times suddenly – heretically! – discredited their manipulative climate scaremongering.
In April, the UN-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) “adjusted” its modeling framework of 4-5°C of global warming by the year 2100, a framework that supported thousands of “analyses” predicting terrifying human consequences for greenhouse gas emissions.
Unsurprisingly, the report was released quietly, without the fanfare that accompanied every horrifying, end-of-the-world “analysis” inspired by the IPCC’s original framework. In fact, it took media (that is, the few that didn’t totally ignore the report) weeks to notice, read, digest and cover the changes.
Mainstream media outlets often ignore – or misrepresent – most, even important stories that do not fit their liberal narratives.
This time, though, after the New York Times had published a 2022 editorial entitled “Climate Change Is Not Negotiable” that argued for radical changes to America’s economy and government to prevent global warming’s allegedly devastating consequences, and a chippy early-April 2026 article entitled “Climate Change Denial Sees a Resurgence in Trump’s Washington,” Times partisans did read the new IPCC report and published a lamentation entitled, “Scientists Ditched a Scary Climate Scenario. What Now?”
What now?
Catastrophic climate change skeptics accept that, over indefinitely long periods of time, climate changes naturally, the evidence for which can be found in the geologic record.
Now that the IPCC has conceded that every breathlessly-predicted, decades-old doomsday model failed to – and will not – materialize, any thoughtful – honest – person knows what skeptics have long known or, at least suspected: apocalyptic, anthropomorphic climate change was – and remains – a hoax.
Now, although devoted climatistas may not call it what it is, more-receptive, less-invested alarmists will – or will be forced to – (grudgingly) admit the fraud.
The IPCC report’s introduction begins, “Scenarios serve as a critical tool in climate change analysis. Defined as plausible alternative descriptions of how the future may develop based on a coherent set of assumptions, they are used by different research communities to explore potential future avenues of socio-economic conditions, assess the effects of different drivers of climate change, characterize future climatic conditions, and assess impacts of climate change as well as adaptation and mitigation responses,” followed by page upon page of “sciency” bafflegab that can be summed up in three words:
“Oops…never mind…”
In May, American Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Roger Pielke, Jr. wrote, that 1) the IPCC’s admission that the group’s previous frameworks lacked “any systematic effort to evaluate plausibility of scenarios,” 2) the IPCC’s new framework “eliminated the most extreme scenarios that have dominated climate research over much of the past several decades,” and 3) “the IPCC and broader research community has now admitted that the scenarios that have dominated climate research, assessment and policy during the past two cycles of the IPCC assessment process are implausible. They describe impossible futures.”
Pielke added that “users of climate models and model output based on legacy scenarios will now face decisions about if and how they’d like to realign with the latest scientific understandings versus continuing to rely on outdated research.”
However, the IPCC’s revision does not exactly rule out catastrophic climate change – Oh, no! Heaven forbid all that climate study grant money should dry up! – but, now, the agency’s “new HIGH scenario is exploratory – a thought experiment, not a projection.”
“Thought experiments” are hypothetical, imagined “scenarios” – emphasis on “imagined.”
So, now, in view of the IPCC’s (somewhat surprising) climate scenario revision and media confirmation, can we all agree that the oceans aren’t going to inundate Manhattan, Miami and Los Angeles, boil off, or freeze over?
And, now that the IPCC has declared the principal arguments for catastrophic anthropomorphic climate change null, perhaps we can also agree on and return to a sane energy policy that prioritizes practical carbon-based and nuclear energy resources, and frees the energy market to determine the genuine relevance of costly, unreliable, intermittent “alternatives.”
https://www.pottsmerc.com/2026/06/07/jerry-shenk-sanity-returns-to-climate-debate/
