The Week Climate Catastrophism Lost Its Grip

Last week may go down as the moment when the climate narrative finally cracked. In climate parlance, a “tipping point” occurred.

In the space of a few days, two events reached millions of people outside the usual scientific and media gatekeeping apparatus, and they both told the same heretical story: that the science of climate catastrophe isn’t nearly as settled, nor as dire, as we’ve been told.

First, the world’s most-watched podcaster, Joe Rogan, hosted two of the most-respected dissenting climate scientists alive, Dr. Richard Lindzen of MIT and Dr. William Happer of Princeton, for a long-form conversation about the actual evidence behind global warming claims. The second event came from inside the climate establishment itself: Ted Nordhaus, founder of the Breakthrough Institute and once a self-described climate activist, published an essay titled “Why I Stopped Being a Climate Catastrophist.”

Each, in its own way, exposed the gulf between scientific nuance and political narrative — and together they may mark a turning point in public understanding.

For years, the mainstream press and peer-review gatekeepers ensured that anyone who questioned climate orthodoxy was dismissed as a “denier.” That tactic doesn’t work when Joe Rogan, whose audience dwarfs CNN’s, sits across the table from two emeritus professors calmly explaining why CO₂ is not the planetary thermostat it’s made out to be.

Lindzen and Happer have impeccable credentials. They are not bloggers, not “influencers,” but physicists who spent decades inside the world’s top research institutions. Their message was simple: the climate system is complex, and the claim that we can fine-tune global temperature with carbon taxes and wind turbines is fantasy.

Happer recounted how, even in the 1990s, climate scientists were the only ones reluctant to defend their work in person, sensing, perhaps, that their models were “hollow and useless.” Lindzen reminded listeners that the warming so far is modest, that extreme-weather trends show no alarming increase, and that the benefits of CO₂ fertilization for global agriculture are real.

The reaction online was immediate and revealing. Within 24 hours, the episode had nearly a million YouTube views and thousands of comments cheering the guests for “finally telling the truth” about climate science. People who had never heard of radiative forcing or water-vapor feedback suddenly realized that skepticism wasn’t ignorance — it is the original scientific method at work.

Then, just as Rogan’s episode was trending, Ted Nordhaus dropped his own intellectual bombshell. His 7,000-word essay on the Breakthrough Journal’s site reads like a confession — and perhaps the most important one the climate movement has ever seen.

“I no longer believe this hyperbole,” Nordhaus writes, reflecting on his earlier predictions that fossil-fuel use would trigger wars and collapse the Amazon rainforest. He now acknowledges that the “business-as-usual” scenarios of five degrees warming by 2100 were never plausible — that they assumed absurdly high population growth, unrealistic economics, and slow technological progress. The best current estimates, he notes, are closer to three degrees or less.

Nordhaus goes further. He points out that despite 1.5 °C of warming since pre-industrial times, global mortality from climate and weather extremes has fallen by a factor of 25 on a per-capita basis — likely the lowest in recorded history. The increase in disaster losses, he observes, stems mainly from more people and property located in hazard-prone areas, not from stronger storms.

Perhaps most damningly, he admits that much of the climate community “simply shifted the locus of catastrophe.” When the models cooled, the rhetoric heated up. Science hadn’t become more certain; marketing had become more desperate.

For a founder of one of the green movement’s own think tanks to say this publicly is seismic. It is an insider’s acknowledgment that the line between climate science and climate politics has long since blurred.

The gatekeepers are losing control; what makes this week different is scale. Academic journals and major newspapers can still filter which studies or op-eds reach print. But they can’t filter Rogan’s audience of 10 million listeners. They can’t suppress a viral essay shared across platforms by readers hungry for honesty rather than apocalypse.

For years, the scientific establishment relied on social intimidation — the idea that only a crank would question “The Science.” Yet here we have one of America’s most prominent environmentalists conceding that catastrophism is unsupported, and two world-class scientists calmly walking through why CO₂ sensitivity is overstated. The curtain has been pulled back.

The irony, of course, is that both events appealed not to ideology but to data. Happer and Lindzen emphasized the lack of empirical evidence linking rising CO₂ directly to worsening weather. Nordhaus emphasized the historical record of human adaptation — the reality that modern infrastructure, technology, and wealth have made us less vulnerable to climate extremes, not more.

And both criticized the same thing: how fear has replaced science. “Highly educated people are often more likely to stubbornly hold onto erroneous beliefs because they are more expert at defending their ideological commitments,” Nordhaus writes, summarizing the groupthink that dominates academic and political institutions.

Public opinion doesn’t shift overnight, but it can pivot sharply when people sense they’ve been manipulated. Climate policy has become a trillion-dollar industry built on exaggerated forecasts and moral panic. When respected scientists and former activists both say the emperor has no clothes, the spell begins to break.

This week, millions heard arguments they were told didn’t exist — and discovered that reasoned skepticism isn’t denial, it’s sanity. They heard that uncertainty is not heresy, that data matters more than consensus, and that energy policies should serve humanity, not ideology.

If there is a real “tipping point” in climate discourse, it may not be in the atmosphere but in public consciousness — a shift away from fear toward evidence, from censorship toward open debate.

For decades, the establishment has insisted that questioning the narrative is dangerous. The real danger, as Lindzen, Happer, and now Nordhaus remind us, is what happens when we stop questioning at all.

Anthony Watts ([email protected]) is a senior fellow at The Heartland Institute.

Editor’s Note: The Schumer Shutdown is here. Rather than put the American people first, Chuck Schumer and the radical Democrats forced a government shutdown for healthcare for illegals. They own this.

Please help us continue to report the truth about the Schumer Shutdown. Use promo code POTUS47 to get 74% off your VIP membership.