Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth
GOOD NEWS! The malign influence of the Catastrophic, Anthropogenic Global Warming meme (CAGW) (1) that more than 40 years ago escaped to infect the world – like a virus from a Wuhan Lab – is finally beginning to collapse.
The evidence is clear. Despite trillions of dollars spent in CO2 abatement schemes over the past 20+ years, fossil fuels still provide around 80% of our energy needs (having declined from 80.2% when the 20-year effort began). . Most of the balance, then as now, comes from nuclear and hydro (2). Global coal consumption reached an all-time record high in 2025 (3). The once celebrated 2015 Paris Agreement to move the world to net zero human carbon emissions by 2050 is now a sick joke more honoured in the breach than the observance by those countries foolish enough to sign up to it. The latest UN climate gabfest (COP 30 in Belem, Brazil: the 10th anniversary of Paris) ended just a few months ago in disagreement, recrimination and futility. European countries – the most enthusiastic adopters of net zero programs – are seeing their economies decline as electricity prices soar and their industries move offshore. Realisation is growing that although energy from the sun and wind may be free and renewable, the machines, devices and wires required to capture, store and distribute it most definitely are not. As a result, countries are scaling back on ambitions to power their economies solely with wind and solar. Instead, they are re-opening or refurbishing coal-fired power stations, building new ones and scrambling to sign up new gas and oil supplies.
An October 2025 paper (4) published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society shows that species level extinction due to climate change “have not significantly increased over the last approximately 200 years” thus hopefully putting an end to the absurd extremist claim that CAGW is causing or will cause the Sixth Mass Extinction event in the history of life on earth.
Meanwhile, the majority of small Pacific and Indian ocean island nations continue to grow in area despite modest sea level rises. And that includes these poster children for climate catastrophists – the tiny island nations of The Maldives and Tuvalu (5).
Throughout the world, ticking Climate “Doomsday clocks” (and there are many) are regularly reset to avoid them becoming a permanent record of failed prediction.
COP25 (Glasgow 2020- the 5th anniversary of Paris) in hindsight now appears to have marked the highwater mark of climate alarmist madness. During this meeting the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ) and their flagship group the Net Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) was set up. This was a banking cartel that colluded to deny all funding for fossil fuel exploration and development. The alliance boasted hundreds of financial institutions controlling $130 trillion in assets. Mendicant Governments and NGOs lined up for the chance to get their fingers sticky in that honey pot. Since then, the group has collapsed as virtually all major US, European and Japanese banks have withdrawn (6). Mark Carney, (formerly Governor of the Bank of England and the UN Special Envoy on Climate Action – now Prime Minister of Canada) is walking back the draconian CO2 abatement schemes of his predecessor Justin Trudeau.
In January 2025 Donald Trump was inaugurated as President of the United States. Enough said.
Prominent CAGW supporters have recanted.
Study after scientific study continue to demonstrate that the world is becoming greener and food crops are giving ever higher yields as a result of increasing atmospheric CO2 fertilisation (7). In the case of food crops, an additional factor is the application of cheap nitrate fertiliser derived through the Haber-Bosch process from natural gas and atmospheric nitrogen.
Over the last 100 years, global deaths from natural disasters (adjusted for population increase) have declined by over 95% (8).
Sceptical scientists are now increasingly getting their papers published, and having alarmist papers retracted (see footnote 12 in this ref here). Yea and verily, even by those grim gatekeepers of CAGW orthodoxy – the editors of the Journals Science and Nature.
But it is Too Soon to Celebrate
Fashionable fads and fashions (cultural memes) in the wider, non-scientific, community are relatively ephemeral phenomena that appear and disappear suddenly and mysteriously (9). But scientific fads and fashions (memes) that have the weight and inertia of established Institutions behind them can take decades to die out as their adherents, one by one, retire or die. Because they have invested so little time in acquiring them, the enthusiasms, beliefs and opinions of the young can change easily. But for the heavily invested old, the process can be much harder. The long years of hard study and training that it takes to master a field of science tends to impose rigidity of thought and resistance to new ideas. To this human failing a new and additional rigidity (ossification) is now being imposed on institutional science by AI Large Language Models, all of which are “trained” on orthodoxy and consensus as part of their basic architecture (10).
“Science advances one funeral at a time”, the physicist Max Planck quipped in the 1920s.
“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses one by one”. Charles Mackay, wrote in his still relevant and popular 1841 book: Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.
Many historical examples of the inherent inertia of science memes could be quoted, here are just two:
Example 1: Late 19th century Eugenics theory and practice held sway for 60 years and was only discredited after WWII when the world at last fully appreciated the logical progression of eugenics theory into inhumanity and genocide. A better scientific understanding of how heredity actually works also played a part. You can read about the rise and fall of Eugenics HERE.
Example 2: Beginning in the late 1940s, an overwhelming consensus (98.9%, according to a 1976 survey) developed among medical and nutritional scientists in rich western nations. They concluded that diets rich in fats (lipids) were the major cause of coronary heart disease. The Lipophobia (fear of fat) meme held sway for over 50 years and was responsible for The Great Diet Shift of the 20th century where eating habits shifted away from meat, dairy and eggs to bread, pasta, potatoes, rice and sugar (a sure recipe for obesity and diabetes). But it provided good living for those who promoted the scare with sublime self-confidence and ex-cathedra authority. The meme finally collapsed around the millennium when the results of numerous long-continued clinical trials were finally published. If interested, you can read all about the great fat scare of the latter half of the 20th century in an earlier post of mine HERE.
For we sceptics, although many battles were won in 2025 and the possibility of an end to the struggle is in sight (“say not the struggle naught availeth”…(11)), it is too soon to celebrate. The war on the CAGW doomsday cult is far from won. As 2025 rolls over to 2026, die-hard cultists, both institutional scientists and the useful idiots who support them, have merely retired to lick their wounds, plan new strategies and double down on their alarmist predictions.
They are not thinking: “we have overplayed our hand and are losing this fight”. They are thinking: ”we were not extreme enough”.
So, in these dog days of 2026, in a re-purposed garage near you, the useful idiots are working hard…
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(1) Those who control the language control the narrative. Around 2010, climate alarmists cynically changed the name of this meme from Global Warming to Climate Change. This allowed them to attribute any extreme weather event, be it heat or cold, flood or drought, calm or storm to rising CO2 levels. A theory that can predict anything, predicts nothing. It is immune to falsification. For every bad event that happens, it was the evil CO2 wot done it.
(2) Source: Our World in Data. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitution
(3) Source: International Energy Agency. https://www.iea.org/reports/coal-25/executive-summary
(4) K. E. Saban & J. J. Weins. Proceedings of the Royal Society Oct 2025. Unpacking the extinction crisis: rates patterns and causes of recent extinctions in plants and animals. Proc Biol Sci (2025)292(2057): https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2025.1717
(5) P.S.Kench et al (12 authors) 2023: Nature Communications. Reef islands have continually adjusted to environmental change over the past two millennia. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-36171-2
P.S. Kench et al (3 authors) 2018: Nature Communications. Patterns of island change and persistence offer alternate adaptation pathways for atoll nations. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-02954-1
(6) Source: New York Times. https://nytimes.com/2026/01/17/climate/how-wall-street-turned-its-back-on-climate-change.html
(7) Source: Our World in Data https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/key-crop-yields
(8) Source: Our World in Data. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/natural-disaster-death-rates
(9) As a boy, I remember the schoolyard fashion for Yo-Yos (spinning tops on the end of a looped string). It came out of nowhere and swept the world but lasted all of two years. Today, for the young, it is six-seven. And no, I don’t know what that means. Even Wikipedia doesn’t know what it means. I think that’s rather the point. When old guys like me (and you, dear reader, if you’re over 18) get to hear of a pop-meme, it’s probably already a thing of the past.
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(10) Joe Nalvan Jan 5, 2026: AI Models and Their “Knowledge” of Climate Change. https://judithcurry.com
(11) From an 1855 poem by Arthur Hugh Clough. “Say not the struggle naught availeth, The labour and the wounds are vain: The enemy faints not nor faileth, As things have been they yet remain…. But westward, look, the land is bright”