As 2025 Rolls Over to 2026…
Good News! The malign influence of the Catastrophic, Anthropogenic Global Warming meme (CAGW) (1) that more than 40 years ago escaped like a virus from a Wuhan Lab to infect the world, 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 80% of our energy needs (having declined from 80.2% when the 20-year effort began). Most of the balance comes from hydro. 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 31 in Brazil) ended just a few weeks 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. Realisation is growing that although energy from the sun and wind may be free and renewable, the machines and devices required to capture, store and distribute it most definitely are not. As a result, throughout the world 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.
Throughout the world, ticking Climate “Doomsday clocks” (and there are many) are regularly reset to avoid them becoming a permanent record of failed prediction.
International cartels of woke bankers that once colluded to deny funding for fossil fuel exploration and development have collapsed. Mark Carney, (formerly Governor of the Bank of England – the wokest banker of them all, now Prime Minister of Canada) is walking back the draconian CO2 abatement schemes of his predecessor Justin Trudeau. In January 2025, Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, enough said. Prominent CAGW supporters have recanted.
Sceptical scientists increasingly are 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.
Fashionable fads and fashions (cultural memes) in the wider, non-scientific, community are relatively ephemeral phenomena that usually appear and disappear suddenly and mysteriously (2). But scientific fads and fashions that have the weight and inertia of established Institutions behind them die out only slowly through the death or retirement of their adherents. The long years of hard study and training that it takes to master a field of science can impose a rigidity of thought and resistance to new ideas.
“Science advances one funeral at a time”, famous physicist Max Planck observed 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 McKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Herds, 1841.
Many examples 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 Thery and practice HERE.
Example 2: Beginning in the late 1940s, an overwhelming consensus (98.9%, according to a 1976 survey!) developed among medical scientists/nutritionists in rich western nations. They concluded that fat-rich diets were the major cause of coronary heart disease. Characterised as Lipophobia (fear of fat), this meme lasted 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 pasta, potatoes, rice and sugar (a sure recipe for obesity and diabetes-2). But it provided a 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 finally became available. If interested, you can read all about the fat scare of the latter half of the 20th century in an earlier post of mine HERE.
So, for we sceptics, although a few battles were won in 2025 and the possibility of an end to the struggle is in sight (“say not the struggle naught availeth” ((3)), 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 lost this fight”. They are thinking: ”we were not extreme enough”.
Meanwhile, in a re-purposed garage near you…
Useful Idiots, doubling down
******
(1) Around 2010, the name of this meme morphed from Global Warming to Climate Change. This was deliberate. It meant that any extreme weather event, be it heat or cold, flood or drought, calm or storm could the more easily be attributed to rising CO2 levels. Since climate is always changing, predictions become immune to falsification. Anything (other than a millennial-scale climate stasis which has never happened in the long history of the world) could now be made to fit the theory: “For every bad event that happens, CO2 caused it”.
(2) I remember the schoolyard fashion for Yo-Yos (spinning tops on the end of a looped string) when I was a boy. 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 either, but look it up quickly before this meme too disappears.
(3) Arthur Hugh Clough, 1855. “Say not the struggle not availeth, the enemy faints not nor faileth, but westwards look the land is bright”