Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth (1)
Good News!
The malign influence of the Catastrophic, Anthropogenic Global Warming meme (CAGW) (2) 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 $14 trillion (an estimated figure by Bjorn Lomberg) spent by world governments in CO2 abatement schemes over the past 20 years, atmospheric levels of CO2 have continued to rise.
Today fossil fuels provide more than 80% of our energy needs, a proportion that has barely changed from 20 years ago. Most of the balance, then as now, comes from nuclear and hydro (3). Although the absolute amount of energy from wind and solar has increased over that period, so have all other sources of energy. A rising tide of demand has lifted all boats: there has been No Energy Transition.
A rising tide lifts all boats. (Click for larger, sharper image)
With the best sites already taken, new wind and solar “farms” are having to be built in widely-scattered, remote, onshore or offshore locations. This requires thousands of kilometers of new transmission lines that cost much more than the installations themselves. Governments attempt to overcome this problem with huge subsidies, but their capacity to do this is limited. The resulting distribution bottlenecks will make the renewable installations currently being built stranded assets (see: Barclays Transition Realism White Paper February 2026 for a detailed argument on this case).
Despite, or perhaps because of, increasing atmospheric CO2 levels and a barely noticeable rise in global average temperature over the past 150 years, all measures of human wellbeing – wealth, health, nutrition, clean water, education – show that humanity is thriving. But the killer metric – the one that encapsulates all others, is longevity. According to Our World in Data, in 1900 average global life expectancy at birth was 32 years; in 1950 it was 45 years; in 2021 it was 70 years while today (2025) it is 73 years. Huge relative inequities still remain of course (700 million have no access to electricity), but the poor of yesterday would consider themselves rich if they had even half the comforts, amenities and opportunities available to the poor of today.
In Paris, in 2015, the 21st annual United Nations Conference on Climate Change (known as the Conference of Parties, or COP 21), concluded with an agreement that participating countries should take steps to move the world to Net Zero human carbon dioxide emissions by 2050.
On its own insistence, China (who in 2025 built one new coal-fired power station per week and currently emit almost as much CO2 as the rest of the world combined) was excluded from the Agreement on the grounds that it was a “Developing Nation”. They got to move their net zero aspirations forward to 2070. Genuine Third World Developing Nations were given a similar free pass.
Western countries were the first to ratify the 2015 Paris Agreement and became the most enthusiastic adopters of net zero programs. All have seen their economies decline as their electricity prices soar and their industries close or move offshore. A yawning gap has now developed between East Asian countries, increasingly the manufacturers of the world’s consumer and industrial goods, and a rapidly de-industrialising West.
Even as most countries continue to protest that they are still true believers (just give us more time and more money), western Governments are slowly waking up to the reality that, although energy from the sun and wind is free and renewable, the machines, devices and wires required to capture, store and distribute it most definitely are not. And that cost is ruinous.
These machines and devices are largely bought from China who can make them more cheaply than anyone else because their industries use cheap fossil fuel power (and, in the case of solar panel manufacture, slave labour). There are no prizes for guessing where a large proportion of that $14 trillion has gone!
As a result, western countries are finally 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 coal, oil and gas supplies.
In 2020 - the 5th Anniversary of Paris - COP25 was held in the city of Glasgow, Scotland. The meeting was described by (then) Prince Charles, in the typical hyperbolic language of true believers, as “the last chance saloon” for climate action. Inspired by the occasion, Scott Morisson, Prime Minister of Australia and a former fierce champion of fossil fuels, in a Damascene conversion, signed his country up to the Paris Net Zero by 2050 Target. One of the last to sign up to Paris, Australia might become one of the last to leave, switching the lights off as they go.
With hindsight, COP25 in Glasgow now increasingly appears to have been the last chance saloon for climate alarmist madness.
Following the Glasgow meeting, the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ) and their flagship offshoot the Net Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) was set up. This was a cartel of over 140 banks and financial institutions that colluded to deny funding for fossil fuel exploration and development, the money to be transferred to finance renewable energy schemes. The alliance reportedly controlled $130 trillion in assets.
Mendicant Governments and NGOs lined up for the chance to get their fingers sticky in that honey pot.
But the group was formally disbanded on October 3rd 2025, following its abandonment by virtually all major US, European and Japanese banks (4).
Mark Carney, the wokest banker of them all (formerly Governor of the Bank of England, UN Special Envoy on Climate Action, instigator and promoter of the NZBA - now Prime Minister of Canada) is now walking back the draconian CO2 abatement schemes of his predecessor Justin Trudeau (5).
Meanwhile global coal consumption and atmospheric CO2 levels reached record highs in 2025 (6).
The last (November 2025) UN climate conference (COP 30 in Brazil, the 10th anniversary of the Paris) ended in disagreement, recrimination and futility.
Prominent CAGW supporters Bill Gates (the world’s first centi-billionaire and public philanthropist), and James Hansen, (former Director of the NASA-Goddard Institute for Space Studies, widely acknowledged as the father of CAGW), have recanted.
In October 2025 (just before COP 30 in Brazil), Bill Gates issued a statement saying:
Climate Change does not pose an existential threat to civilisation.
Matching actions to words, Gates severely cut back the funding and activities of his climate advocacy and policy group Breakthrough Energy, stating that his money would be better spent on combating disease and poverty.
In 2024, James Hansen, now a late but enthusiastic convert to nuclear power, wrote:
Suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy.
It is hard to escape the fact that the Paris Agreement for Net Zero by 2050 is now a sick joke more honored in the breach than the observance by those countries foolish enough to ratify it.
Dead, buried and soon to be forgotten.
Meanwhile, back in the World of Science
An October 2025 paper (7) published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society shows that species level extinctions due to climate change “have not significantly increased over the last approximately 200 years” thus hopefully putting an end to the absurd claim by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) that CAGW is causing or will cause the Sixth Mass Extinction event in the history of life on earth.
Numerous papers have been published (8) showing that 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, Tuvalu and Vanuatu.
Throughout the world, ticking Climate “Doomsday clocks” (and they come in many forms) are regularly reset to avoid them becoming a permanent record of failed prediction.
Satellite reflectance imagery by NASA conclusively demonstrates that, since this data became available in 1980, the world has become up to 20% greener (i.e.- an increase in the Leaf Area Index or LAI) largely as a result of increasing atmospheric CO2 fertilisation. Studies of leaf stomata confirm this conclusion. For largely the same reason the yields from all major global food crops have been steadily increasing since the 1960s (9), (10).
The world in 2024, from satellite data. All green coloured areas have shown an increase in plant growth over the previous 45 years whilst desert areas (white) have decreased in area. Source of data: NASA
Fears of widespread famine due to overpopulation – the great Malthusian scare of the 1970s and 1980s – are now a thing of the past.
The effects of atmospheric CO2 fertilisation
Over the last 100 years, deaths from weather-related natural disasters (adjusted for global population increase) have declined by over 95% ! (11).
Sceptical scientists are now increasingly getting their papers published, and having alarmist papers retracted. Yea and verily, even by those grim gatekeepers of CAGW orthodoxy – the editors of the Journals Science and Nature (see HERE).
The Museum of Once-Fashionable Science.
But it is Too Soon to Celebrate
In 2024 and 2025, the UN Secretary General António Guterres, variously declared that it is:
Climate crunch time
that:
The oceans are boiling
and:
Planet Earth is being pushed beyond its limits.
however, he added:
There is an exit off the highway to climate hell.
The “exit” he was referring to is the 2015 Paris Agreement.
But in 2019, in a performative stunt for Time Magazine, António Guterres conclusively demonstrated that the oceans are not “boiling”. In fact, he looks rather cold.
In July 2025, the International Criminal Court of Justice (ICC) - sixteen unelected and unaccountable lawyers sitting in The Hague – declared a “human right” to avoiding the “indisputable, urgent and existential threat” of Climate Change. President of the court Yugi Iwasawa added that CC was an “an existential problem of planetary proportions that imperils all forms of life and the very health of our planet” (AP News, July 23, 2025).
These legal opinions enable and encourage years of future litigation and lawfare.
Sixteen unelected lawyers sitting in The Hague. Although nominated by mostly third world countries, their lawyerly dress and pretensions are pure European
Little better can be expected from lawyers – self-righteous orthodoxy is a feature of the legal profession- and few politicians ever see a passing bandwagon parade that they don’t want to join. No doubt the majority members of both groups are sincere and well-meaning persons who see themselves as noble Saviors of the Planet. But they have neither the wit nor the wisdom to realise that the band wagon’s wheels are wobbly and about to fall off. And the cheering crowds are thinning as professional activists move on to more fashionable causes: where once they shouted “Climate Action Now”, today they shout “Free Palestine”.
But what of the climate scientists who designed, built and drive the Climate Change bandwagon? The majority still, by and large, pay service (or, at least, lip-service) to the climate catastrophe meme. It is worth remembering that these scientists are dependent for their funding – their very careers – on politicians. The scientists scare public and Governments with their doomsday models: the politicians, suitably scared, then support the scientists with oceans of money. It is a vicious, self-reinforcing ouroboros loop (12), armored against evidence and reason (see my previous posts, The Mathew Effect and There is no Wisdom in Crowds).
As Upton Sinclair pointed out in 1934:
It difficult to get someone to understand something when his career depends upon his not understanding it.
Fads and fashions (cultural memes) in the wider, non-scientific community are relatively ephemeral phenomena that appear and disappear suddenly and mysteriously. But scientific fads and fashions (usually dignified by the name of paradigms) 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 and opinions of the young can change easily (13), but for the heavily invested old, the process can take much longer. The 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 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 (14).
It is instructive at this point to pause and consider…
A brief History of Earlier False Science Scares
Eugenics theory was born out of late Victorian ideas of Social Darwinism and Scientific Racism. George Orwell, writing in 1945, may well have had eugenics in mind when he wrote:
Some ideas are so absurd only an intellectual could believe them.
Eugenics was first defined and named in 1883 by Francis Galton, a first cousin of Charles Darwin. Committed Eugenicists – almost all successful, educated, middle-class white men – believed that that people like themselves had achieved their privileged status as a result of their superior genes, while the poor were poor largely because they had inferior ones and not, as social reformers believed, because of the inequities of society. Since genes are hereditable, eugenicists held that the human gene pool would be improved by selective sterilisation of the industrial working-class poor through various coercive means, while at the same time offering money to rich white men to persuade them to have more children.
Throughout the first half of the 20th Century, these ideas became widely supported and were regarded by many as settled science. Believing they were Following the Science, throughout the world Governments moved to implement eugenics programs. In the US, from the 1900s through to the 1940s, thousands of “feeble minded” or “sexually promiscuous” women (mostly black) were compulsorily sterilised. The 1927 US Supreme Court test case of Bell v Buck produced an infamous 8:1 ruling that these practices were entirely constitutional. In Sweden during the same period, at least 12,000 women were similarly mutilated under various coercive schemes. In the UK, in 1931, the British Eugenics Society managed to get a Bill for the “Sterilsation of Mental Defectives” put up in the House of Commons. Fortunately the Bill was defeated, mainly through the votes of socialist and Catholic MPs. But the most enthusiastic adopter of eugenic theory was the National Socialist Government of Germany between 1933 and 1945. The Nazis sterilised over 400,000 women and added the innovation of mass genocidal murder to their eugenics toolbox. They did this to eliminate the genes of those whom they considered unfit, undesirable and racially “impure” from European society. It took the belated realisation in 1945 of the full horrors of Nazi eugenics programs to finally discredit the theory. A better scientific understanding of how heredity actually works then put the final nail in its coffin.
You can read more about the rise and fall of eugenics in an earlier post of mine called The Mathew Effect.
Around the same time as eugenics theory was being discredited, another fashionable science meme arose to replace it. In the late 1940s, medical and nutritional scientists declared that the over consumption of dietary fat (lipids) was the primary cause of Coronary Heart Disease (CHD). In 1976, the US Committee on Nutrition declared that an astonishing 98.9% of American medical scientists supported the dietary fat-CHD connection.
Following years of relentless exhortation from scientists, academicians, bureaucrats, media and profit-seeking manufacturers, whole populations across the Western World shifted away from eating meat, dairy and eggs to bread, rice, pasta, potatoes and sugar – a sure recipe for diabetes and obesity.
It took the publication around the turn of the Millennium of numerous massive, heroic and long-continued epidemiological surveys to conclusively demonstrate that there was no connection between fat consumption and heart disease.
Science is ultimately self-correcting but, as with the preceding eugenics scare, it took 50 years and enormous human suffering for that to happen.
You can read more about the Great Fat Scare of the late 20th Century, along with references and documentation, in an earlier post of mine called Fear of Fat.
And what, in its turn, has replaced the eugenics madness of the first half of the 20th century and the fat scare of the second half of the 20th Century to terrify the inhabitants of the 21st? CLIMATE CHANGE.
As the philosopher George Santayana gloomily observed in 1906:
Those who don’t know history are condemned to repeat it.
Conclusion – There is Hope, but There is Also a Warning
For 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), it is too soon to celebrate. The war on the CAGW (Climate Change) 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 to double down on their alarmist predictions. They are not thinking:
We misinterpreted the evidence. We cherry-picked the data. We got it wrong. We apologise.
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…
Swimming in an ocean of hydrocarbon products, the useful idiots are working hard.
******
(Updated and reformatted March, 2026)
Footnotes and References
(1) The title of this post is a line 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”. Winston Churchill used the quote in a speech to the House of Commons during the dark days of 1941.
(2) Around 2010, the CAGW global warming meme was in trouble. Global average temperatures had been in slight decline for over ten years, the 2009 UN Climate Conference (COP 15 in Copenhagen) was an acknowledged failure with no agreement among its 60,000+ delegates, the Northern Hemisphere winter of 2009-10 was one of the coldest and snowiest in decades and thousands of hacked (or leaked?) emails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia had been made public in 2009 demonstrating years of malpractice and scientific finagling by prominent CAGW researchers - a scientific scandal that became known as Climategate.
To meet the crisis, and considering that those who control the language control the narrative, the promoters of the meme changed its name from Global Warming to Climate Change. Although climate has always changed and no doubt always will, the new name had a nice alliterative feel to it and was rapidly adopted by doomsday cultists. It had the advantage of allowing climate scientists to attribute any future extreme weather event, be it heat or cold, flood or drought, calm or storm, abundance or scarcity, to rising CO2 levels. The theory thus became immune to falsification. For every bad event that happened, climate alarmists were now able to argue “it was rising atmospheric CO2 levels that caused it”. But a theory that can explain everything, predicts nothing.
(3) Source: Our World in Data. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitution
(4) Source: New York Times. https://nytimes.com/2026/01/17/climate/how-wall-street-turned-its-back-on-climate-change.html
(5) In the northern Autumn of 2025, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney indicated he would approve completion of the 2000 km Keystone XL Pipeline, previously cancelled by his predecessor Justin Trudeau, and by President Joe Biden of the US. The pipeline is designed to take crude from the Alberta oil fields of Canada to refineries in the western and mid-western United Sates.
(6) Source: International Energy Agency. https://www.iea.org/reports/coal-25/executive-summary
(7) 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 and…
(8) 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
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
(9) Sources: Our World in Data- https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/key-crop-yields
(10) Another reason for ever increasing yields of major food crops is the use of nitrate fertiliser (urea) – a product made by the Haber-Bosch process from atmospheric nitrogen and hydrogen. Nitrogen is the major component of the atmosphere – abundant, ubiquitous and free. Currently, the only economic source of hydrogen is natural gas. The cost urea is the cost of natural gas.
The effect of nitrogen fertiliser on a crop of wheat. Photo source: Deli Chen, University of Melbourne
(11) Source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/decadal-deaths-disasters-type.png
(12) Ouroboros : An ancient symbol of a snake eating its own tail. An endless loop. A vicious circle.
If you Google the word, you will be informed that it is a symbol representing: ”the infinite loop of time”. Whatever that means. In my opinion: meaningless baloney. The real symbolism is perfectly clear.
(13) Ephemeral cultural memes. As a boy, I remember the schoolyard fashion for Yo-Yos (spinning tops on the end of a looped string). It came from 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. Wikipedia doesn’t know what it means. I think that’s rather the point. When old guys like me (and you too, dear reader, if you’re over 16) get to hear of a pop-meme, it’s probably already yesterday’s thing.
(14) Joe Nalvan Jan 5, 2026: AI Models and Their “Knowledge” of Climate Change. https://judithcurry.com