It’s been a cold winter so far in the Midwest and much of the Northeast, early-in-the-season snow even in Washington, D.C., and temperatures falling to freezing and below in much of the South. Come to think of it, North America’s 2024-25 winter was pretty cold, too. It’s gotten to the point that “polar vortex” is a phrase on just about everyone’s lips.
Of course, you are surely aware — as those of us with doubts about inevitably disastrous global warming were often told — that there’s a difference between weather and climate. Weather is anecdote, climate is long-standing trend. And the long-standing trend in climate, we have been told this entire past quarter-century, is toward a hotter climate all over the world, with multiple catastrophic consequences.
Now, we seem to have reached an Emily Litella moment — the moment when, on the now half-century-old Saturday Night Live program, the befuddled character realized that she had misheard and misinterpreted some anodyne comment and had been propounding an absurd theory, and dismissed it with a hurried “Never mind.”
Playing the Litella role this October was Bill Gates, who, as a mega-philanthropist, makes serious efforts to gauge whether the causes to which he has contributed have been worth the money. Although “climate change will have serious consequences,” he said, using the two-word phrase that replaced global warming as it was becoming apparent that Earth wasn’t uniformly warming in line with predictions, “It will not lead to humanity’s demise. People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future.”
Numbered also among the converts — the use of religious metaphor is not accidental; more below — is Breakthrough Institute research director Ted Nordhaus. “I used to argue that if the world kept burning fossil fuels at current rates, catastrophe was virtually assured,” he wrote this fall in Free Press. “I no longer believe this hyperbole.”
He pointed out that the demographic and physical factors on which he based his predictions two decades ago have not come to pass, and that despite measurable warming, some of which is attributable to human activity, people have adapted, and any damage has been well short of catastrophic. As British science writer Matt Ridley notes, claims such as Al Gore’s 2006 prediction of a 20-foot sea-level rise in 20 years have fallen short — by 19 feet and nine inches.
Meanwhile, the undermining of hyperbolic scenarios has, as Wall Street Journal economics reporter Greg Ip wrote this week, led the likes of Canadian Prime Minister (and former British central banker) Mark Carney and BlackRock DEO Larry Fink to downplay the risks of climate change, as most American voters have done some time ago.
In all this, I see elements of religious conversion. Advocates of drastic action to address global warming climate change tend to be secular in religion but religious in their devotion to their cause. We have sinned, with our SUVs and corporate jets frying the Earth; we must atone by reducing our (or others’) standards of living; we must faithfully perform daily rituals, adjusting our thermostats and sort our trash for recycling.
The science writer John Tierney reports that the New York Times received a record number of letters in response to his 1996 article that it was economically and environmentally wasteful. It was like telling traditional Catholics their rosaries were a waste of time.
For many Americans of a certain age, any change in the climate they remember from the summer when they were 16 is a change for the worse, just like any change from the playlist of songs they remember from that glorious summer. Satellite radio programmers and canned music providers in shopping malls provide the music from that golden moment, and politicians promising to halt climate change promise to provide the golden weather.
But my impression is that those musical offerings are, like the baby boomer generation, getting scarcer, and certainly the demand in the political marketplace for restoration of that golden summer’s weather climate seems to have grown weaker too.
This is operating within a larger cultural trend, an increasing skepticism of science and scientists. Earlier this month, as a Wall Street Journal editorial was among the few to emblazon, the journal Nature retracted a study that projected climate change could lead to a 62% economic decline by 2100. Among the factors that skewed the results threefold was the 1995-99 data from Uzbekistan. You can almost hear Emily Litella saying, “Never mind.”
Such shoddiness seems amusing, at least until you consider the “replication crisis” in which scientists have been unable to replicate the results of dozens of peer-reviewed and journal-published experiments, some of them famous like the Stanford prison experiment.
And then there was the effort, successful during the COVID crisis, by NIH official Dr. Anthony Fauci, to suppress the now generally accepted theory that the virus spread because of a leak from the lab in Wuhan, China, whose gain-of-function research, deliberately strengthening viruses, was subsidized despite a ban by President Barack Obama in 2014.
So, the public’s skepticism of science and scientists is not surprising, though it’s surely having some unfortunate effects. People can see that expert recommendations, pushed by teacher unions, to close schools despite children’s negligible COVID-19 risk have resulted in long-lasting learning loss. And they are seeing one prominent preacher after another of environmental doom from climate change suddenly saying, like Emily Litella, “Never mind.”
