Climate Alarmism Melting with the Evidence

The Associated Press can still write that scientists have long warned of more intense heat waves, storms, floods and droughts, and that what once seemed like fiction now looks inevitable. That sentence is the old climate-crisis script. It is also, on several of the phenomena it lists, at odds with what the IPCC's own assessments say has been detected so far. Coverage of climate has fallen since the change of administration in Washington; some desks have been cut. The remaining copy often behaves as if the public still needs to be told that every flood is a trend and every storm a verdict. A Data for Progress poll found that 61 percent of likely voters, and 72 percent of Democrats, believe extreme weather has increased over the past five years. Belief is not the same as a detected global increase in every category the wire services name.

Roger Pielke Jr., whose work the IPCC working groups have cited, has put official trend series on public dashboards for the United States and the world. The point is not that climate is static. Heat waves have increased in the United States and globally; cold extremes have declined. For flooding, drought, winter storms and hurricanes in the U.S. record as he presents it, and for tropical cyclones, tornadoes, drought and flooding in the global IPCC summary he uses, there is no detected change of the sort the catastrophe copy assumes. Wildfire area burned in the United States has risen; global fire series are too short for the same claim. Pielke is not a "denier" in the cartoon sense. He treats warming as a risk over time and has supported decarbonisation. What he objects to is the habit of reporting trends the assessment reports do not show. Reporters on the climate beat have been the last audience for the dashboards. That is the media problem in miniature: the UN panel is treated as gospel when it can be quoted as doom, and ignored when it declines to certify a rise in hurricanes or global flood frequency.

A second, sharper argument sits beside that mismatch. Kevin Dayaratna's modelling for Advancing American Freedom runs the kind of simulations climate policy is sold on and asks what Americans would buy if the United States eliminated every ton of fossil CO₂. Even after loading the exercise with IPCC-style assumptions and pretending cuts began in 2020 and stuck forever, the result is about 0.11°C less warming by 2050 and 0.24°C by 2100. State-by-state shares of that sliver are fractions of a tenth of a degree. Climate Change Dispatch pushes further and says that once those model assumptions are dropped, the case for treating CO₂ cuts as a thermometer control collapses altogether. That is a contest with the mainstream physical picture, the IPCC still attributes most recent warming to greenhouse gases and projects more heat extremes if concentrations keep rising, not a secret IPCC recantation. What the two pieces share is a narrower, harder point: headline alarm and national industrial sacrifice are being sold on effects that, even inside the official models, a single country's emissions cannot deliver at a scale anyone would feel, and on weather trends the same official literature often has not detected.

The persistence of the script is therefore not a lag in the science so much as a lag in the incentives of the people who translate it. Heat is up; cold is down; many of the disasters used as weekly proof are not, in the assessed records, marching in lockstep with the copy. Zeroing American CO₂, on the models used to justify the spend, moves the global needle by amounts lost in the noise of a seasonal forecast. Challenging the size of CO₂'s lever is a scientific fight that will not be settled in a wire story. Pretending the IPCC has already certified a planetary increase in every storm and flood is not a scientific fight. It is a narrative that survived the moment when the assessment reports became more careful than the headlines that still quote them.

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/energy/ap-article-follows-old-climate-crisis-script-contradicts-ipcc-science-trends

https://climatechangedispatch.com/cutting-co2-emissions-warming-climate-impact/