Climate change is an existential threat to civilization and humankind, according to top scientists, journalists, and policymakers. They say that planetary warming caused by human emissions is making forest fires, hurricanes, and floods more frequent, worse, and more widespread; reducing arctic ice and submerging atoll islands; killing the coral on the Great Barrier Reef; worsening heatwaves and reducing crop yields. Former President Biden said climate change is “an existential threat to all of us,” and scientists and environmentalists say “one billion” to “billions” will die from food shortages and other climate impacts.

But those claims are all nonsense. Climate change is real, but there was never any scientific evidence that it posed a threat to civilization and humankind. The area of Earth on fire has declined for decades, and what determines whether there are high-intensity fires is forest management and other forms of fire protection. There is no increase in hurricane frequency or intensity, and flood deaths and damages are determined by infrastructure and emergency preparedness. Nearly 90 percent of atoll islands have either increased in size or stayed the same in recent decades. Arctic ice did not decline from 2000 to 2024 and likely will not decline in the coming years. Coral on the Great Barrier Reef is at a 36-year high. Crop yields continue to climb, even with higher temperatures, aided in part by greater carbon dioxide. And heat waves were far worse in the 1930s, before significant human emissions, cold deaths outnumber heat deaths, and heat deaths are easily avoidable with access to air conditioning. The claims that billions will die and that climate change poses an existential risk are thus misinformation and, often, given that many scientists know they are lying, intentional disinformation. The best available evidence suggests nobody will die from climate change.

None of this means we should not worry about climate change and humankind’s contribution to it. The evidence that human emissions change the climate is overwhelming, and many climate skeptics simply go too far in dismissing rising temperatures and humankind’s contribution. We have good temperature measures on land and oceans. We have known for over a century that the accumulation of carbon dioxide traps heat and that it has increased by 50 percent since the pre-industrial period, and the fact that it is a small amount of Earth’s atmosphere by volume does not erase its contribution to warming. And, all else being equal, we should not want any change to average global temperatures since humankind created agricultural, urban, and environmental systems to function within today’s moderate temperature band.

But scientists, journalists, and activists have so wildly overstated the claims of climate change that they must at this point be considered lies, given their discrepancy with known scientific facts and highly visible realities. Sea levels have been rising since the mid-19th Century, and there is no scientific evidence that their rise has accelerated since emissions grew significantly after World War II, and the scientists who claim otherwise are manipulating their models to show acceleration when they can just as scientifically show deceleration. Given how clear the data are on climate change’s alleged impacts, the claims to the contrary by scientists, journalists, and activists cannot be attributed to ignorance.

Moreover, there is strong evidence of deliberate deception. I recently documented how a top sea level rise scientist, Robert Kopp of Rutgers, engages in deception. The leading global organization that tracks disasters abruptly and inappropriately changed its methodology after climate expert Roger Pielke, Jr. showed that they had declined from 2000 to 2021.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration gave the false impression that disasters that cost over $1 billion were increasing and then abruptly ended its “Billion-Dollar Disasters Database” after Pielke showed how it had manipulated the numbers.

Because the data clearly show that climate change is not an existential threat, scientists, politicians, and journalists have misrepresented practically every aspect of the issue. Carbon emissions are largely flat over the last decade and there is simply no conceivable way that humankind will produce high enough emissions to meet the wildly high “RCP 8.5” scenario upon which most of the alarmist predictions of future climate impacts show. What’s more, scientists know this perfectly well as Pielke and other scientists have documented abundant natural gas and slower than predicted economic growth and population growth will prevent it. “RCP8.5 is not simply ‘highly unlikely’” explained Pielke recently, “it is falsified, meaning that its emissions trajectory is already well out of step with reality. We showed this conclusively” in recent studies. And yet scientists continue to use the alarmist RCP 8.5 model for the simple fact that the other models simply aren’t alarmist enough.

Why have scientists, politicians, and journalists repeated false and often apocalyptic claims for so long? And how were they able to get away with it?

Careerism, Radicalism, and Secularism

One of the most robust findings in economics and social sciences is that people tend to pursue their self-interest, defined both as financial and relating to societal status, and that has been the case for the scientists, politicians, and journalists who have spread disinformation about climate change for so long. Their careers, status, and funding depend upon making the alarmist case rather than the scientific case since the scientific case says that humankind is doing an excellent job both adapting to the changing climate and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Governments spend billions of dollars financing expensive ways to measure climate change that they would no doubt redirect to more important priorities. Indeed, that is exactly what the US government is currently doing, in no small part due to the scientific research and science-based communications of honest scientists like Roger Pielke, Jr,. Judith Curry, and Mike Hulme. Similarly, many journalists in the media have realized how foolish they look, thanks to people exposing their misinformation on social media, and have tamped down their alarmism.

But careerism alone can’t explain the disinformation and misinformation of scientists, journalists, and politicians, since it backfired in the form of the election of President Donald Trump who has defunded climate science and since other governments will likely follow suit. If the alarmists had persuaded voters of their apocalyptic claims then they never would have reelected someone who says climate change is a hoax perpetuated by China to undermine the US. The alarmists maintained their alarmism for decades after honest scientists and journalists had exposed their misinformation, thus demonstrating a genuine commitment to alarmism that went beyond careerism to reveal an “ends justify the means” mentality. The alarmists clearly believed they were justified in wildly exaggerating to the point of lying or they wouldn’t have kept doing it.

As such, behind much of the apocalyptic claims lies an underlying radicalism, namely the view held as a first principle that modern industrial capitalist civilization is doomed and that only radical changes to the economy and society can save humankind. The private justification by the climatist Left for grossly and deliberately misrepresenting the science was that it was essential for getting the public to embrace renewables, reductions in consumption and wealth, and “degrowth,” meaning the deliberate creation of economic recession and depression intended to last for decades or longer. In fact, the apocalyptic movement’s anti-industrial de-growth vision long predates its supposed preoccupation with climate change, and was rooted in a 1960s-era Malthusian, radical-Left anti-civilization vision. From the mid-60s to the early 1990s, left-wing academics, think tanks, policymakers and others promoted their low-growth utopian vision as a solution to nuclear energy, both for weapons and electricity. Starting in the 1990s, after the threat of nuclear war declined with the end of communism, the Left shifted its justification for a world powered by renewables to climate apocalypse. People like Al Gore, who had previously been pro-renewables for fear of nuclear, suddenly became pro-renewables because they supposedly gained special knowledge of the threat of climate change.

The radical “new world” and new humans the climatist Left envisioned was a spiritual fever dream and substitute for older religions, particularly Christianity and Puritanism. But because the people pushing it were overwhelmingly secular, disbelieving in God, the soul, and the afterlife, they had to use the language of science to justify their fantasies. The radicalism of the Left’s 100% renewables and “net zero” agenda took the form of a dogma that used Christian language to invert foundational Christian and civilization’s values. Instead of humans having “dominion” over Earth, Earth should have dominion over humans. Instead of getting right by God, people should get right by nature.

The Left’s climatism went hand-in-hand with its scientism, or use of scientific language to illegitimately make moral claims. We should engage in “biomimicry,” becoming like nature, and radically reorganize global capitalism to follow the logic of “natural capital,” the climatists held. Renewables would limit and subjugate humankind to natural energy “flows” rather than fossil fuel or uranium “stocks.” Radical-Left scientists, academics, and journalists promoted climatist ideas as if they possessed special knowledge not just of the coming climate apocalypse but also how to achieve “sustainability,” a secular fantasy of immortality. Instead of following priests, we should look to them, scientists, and other professionals, for guidance in how to radically reorganize our lives and our societies.

Climatism emerged, unconsciously, among educated elites in direct response to the existential anxiety they experience from secularism, or believing there is no God, soul, or afterlife. It is instinct to be afraid of death, but dwelling on one’s death is unpleasant and self-defeating, and so most people repress their fears, which emerge through fantasies of civilizational destruction and their personal heroism, dreams of immortality. Over the last 150 years, one of the ways these fears emerge among educated people is as various political religions, including communism, wokeism, and climatism. These belief systems meet some of the psychological and spiritual needs of educated, professional, and ostensibly secular people to feel like their lives matter, that they have a purpose, and that they merit societal trust and political power.

Having self-identified as “the Elect” on a mission to herald the coming apocalypse and the “good news” of sustainability, left-wing scientists, journalists, and politician-activists, from Gore to Greta Thunberg, embraced a Machiavellian “ends justify the means” approach. On the one hand, the climatists genuinely believed that a first principle, that modern industrial capitalist civilization was doomed. On the other hand, they knew that the scientific data did not show what they needed it to show to justify their radical demands for degrowth and de-civilization. And so they deliberately misrepresented the science.

Alarmist leftists used various means to do so. They used indirect measures, complicated models, and data covering periods of time too short to measure a trend. The models could produce various outputs, and so they simply cherry-picked the alarmist outputs, whether of accelerated sea level rise or RCP 8.5, and claimed “with very high confidence” in reports by the IPCC and others that only the alarmist outcomes were scientific. They exaggerated minor factors like warmer air and downplayed major factors like the mismanagement of forests, water infrastructure, and flood warning systems. And the radical leftists, posing as serious scientists and journalists, systematically demonized as “climate deniers,” sued, and sought to defund and even fire anyone who did good science and journalism by pointing out their various manipulations.

Climatism Is Civilization-Ending

The Left’s climatism is today undermining Western civilization. Germany just yesterday blew up the cooling towers of a nuclear plant and announced that its Foreign Minister would cancel his trip to China, which has Germany over a barrel when it comes to semiconductors, thanks to Germany’s degrowth agenda, which demonized even carbon-free sources of energy like nuclear power. The UK has some of the most expensive energy in the world, which is choking its economy, because the nation’s net-zero policies prohibit it from exploiting its abundant natural gas reserves, and use renewables to undermine nuclear energy. As such, in the name of saving Western civilization, the climatist Left, led by radical scientists, journalists, and politicians, is destroying it.

The good news is that voters in the West are in the midst of an unprecedented backlash against anti-civilization climatism. Americans re-elected Trump, in part due to growing opposition to extremist green policies like green energy mandates and higher energy prices, and Trump has defunded much of the US government’s climate change research. More Americans (61%) approve of nuclear than renewables (53%), and the world is watching with horror as Germany destroys itself. In Germany, the UK, and France, pro-industry and anti-climatist political parties are the most popular in the country and want to return to cheap nuclear and fossil fuel plants to bring down energy prices and re-industrialize their countries. California Governor Gavin Newsom is expanding oil production ,and Canada’s left-wing prime minister has reduced that nation’s carbon tax to zero.

And honest scientists are increasingly gaining the upper hand in the public discourse thanks to the reduced censorship by social platforms Meta and X, formerly Twitter. Under Elon Musk, X allows right-wing views to circulate far more freely than under the previous management, and that has caused many climatists, including Rutgers University sea level scientist Robert Kopp, to flee to BlueSky, where they have marginalized themselves on the radical Left, leaving X, Meta, and Substack to increasingly influential voices like Pielke and Curry. The opening of journalism to independent publications like Public has allowed for the exposure of deliberately deceptive scientists like Kopp. And the resulting “preference cascade,” where the expression of a preference or opinion by a few individuals triggers a chain reaction, has opened scientific journals to publishing more scientific and honest pieces like the ones by Pielke, Curry, and Voortman and De Vos, which showed no acceleration in sea level rise.

The declining public trust in the mainstream news media and its plummeting share of the audience mean that it’s only a matter of time before Americans learn the true data through social media sources, which will make them even angrier at the climate extremists who misled them for so long. Already this is happening, with Millennials like the 35-year-old former alarmist, Lucy Biggers, who routinely goes viral on TikTok and Instagram for her science-based debunkings of climate misinformation. Biggers is the social media manager for CBS Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss’ publication, The Free Press, and has over 100,000 followers across platforms. The mainstream news media will either need to start telling the truth about the science or it will undermine its credibility, currently at a record low approval of just 28%, even further.

Given our radically altered media landscape, it is inevitable that attitudes toward climate change will change, perhaps dramatically, and the credibility of the deliberately deceptive left-wing scientists, journalists, and politicians will decline. Many young people in particular, 90% of whom felt fear over climate change, will likely be angry at the people who gave them climate anxiety so severe that one-quarter in the UK had nightmares and decided not to have children. Given the fertility and energy crises that imperil Western civilization, the public may soon learn that the real existential threat is not from climate change but rather from climatism.