Was actually planning to post something else this evening. But now that we're already out in territory that deals with deep faith, let's just go ahead and start up that series that over the coming time will be about the Climate Narrative.
Because there's a pattern that repeats itself. Not just every time - but EVERY single time - this untouchable narrative is touched in any way that doesn't align with the one the Man on Television has installed between the ears of many.
A message comes in - often from someone I don't know personally - and not infrequently with a little whiff of moral indignation in the tone, and inside the text itself lies a list of points meant to disprove what I've written. As if the list itself settled the matter. As if the number of points equalled the amount of truth.
For the past year, many messages are directly copied in from ChatGPT.
I don't really have anything against that. The new tools can help say what one might find hard to put into words oneself - there's nothing wrong with that. But they're useless if you don't first think for them yourself, and know what you want them for. If you haven't taken a position yourself first, and just use them as an oracle you consult to get confirmation of what you already believe, then the answer becomes accordingly.
Regardless. It always writes politely. And delivers a well-meaning, neatly constructed answer with many little emojis in front of each point, impactful in the way pure structures can be. And that's precisely what it delivers - without useful prompting, without preconditions, without data, it delivers an average, general and reasonably balanced answer. That's how a language model functions when it's not asked for anything else. It fetches the middle of what's been written about the topic, rounds off the edges, and delivers it back with a friendly tone.
And from the first paragraph it does what it always does under those conditions. It blends two things together that aren't the same. The latest answer was about climate, and here precisely those two things are blended together that just as often get blended together journalistically. Or whatever we should call what we read in the media these days.
It blends what we have measured. And what we have modelled.
Together.
And here we can begin. Because this is the central confusion in the entire climate agenda - and the Climate Narrative - and it's so ingrained in the language that most no longer notice it. CO2 has risen. That's measured. The global average temperature has risen around 1.1 to 1.3 degrees since the end of the 19th century. That's measured. The greenhouse effect is real, the physics behind it is over 150 years old, and no one who seriously cares about climate disputes any of that.
It would have been nice if the ChatGPT answer had stopped here.
Because that's the honest part.
But the text in its answer glides - just like the journalism and the politicians and the news anchor - imperceptibly onward without changing register, and suddenly it's about sea level rise, extreme weather, ecosystems out of balance, coastal cities that must be moved, agriculture becoming more unstable, gulf streams that might collapse and Europe that might suddenly get an entirely different climate. The words flow, the sentences resemble each other, and the reader doesn't notice that we've now travelled from the thermometer over to the simulation. From the measured over to the modelled.
From science to scenario.
And when you look more closely at the modelled, the remarkable thing happens every time. The models have been wrong. Consistently. Throughout my entire lifetime.
Let's begin with the most basic thing.
James Hansen stood before the American Congress in June 1988, a sweltering summer day which he himself later admitted he had chosen deliberately, and presented three scenarios for the planet's temperature development. Scenario A was business as usual. That's what we've actually lived through, actually slightly worse, because CO2 emissions have risen a bit more than Hansen himself expected. His model predicted under that scenario a temperature rise that was approximately twice as large as what we've actually seen. That's not a small deviation. It's a fundamental error in the climate sensitivity of his model - meaning how much the system actually reacts to a doubling of CO2, and that's precisely the parameter on which the models build almost all their catastrophe projections.
That doesn't mean Hansen was a fool. It means he modelled a system he didn't fully understand, and that reality has consistently lain in the lower end of his predictions, and that should have led to a corresponding lowering of the alarms.
That never happened.
The alarms have only gotten louder.
Take sea level rise. It's one of the few things that's actually been measured. The global sea level rise through the 20th century lies at about 1.7 millimetres per year in the best reconstructions from tide gauges. Since 1993, when satellite measurements took over, the rate lies around 3.1 to 3.4 millimetres per year. That's a rise, yes. It's also a rate that's not historically without precedent. Similar rates are observed in the 1920s and 1930s, and in certain studies even higher rates in the 1980s. When Hansen that same year, 1988, predicted 30 to 120 centimetres of sea level rise by the middle of this century, he didn't just miss. He missed by more than ten times - on the low side!
When you then read the ChatGPT answer again, it talks about sea level rise as a problem we can't handle, with coastal cities and infrastructure and something that's expensive, slow, difficult to stop. That's not a factual description of a measured physical process, but a language that borrows its weight from the measured to give weight to the modelled.
Then there's the extreme weather.
Here it gets really interesting. Because when you open the UN's own climate panel's latest report, AR6, and read chapter 11 about extremes, you find something that stands in screaming contrast to the media headlines.
There is no demonstrated increase in the frequency of landfalling hurricanes in the Atlantic in over 50 years.
There is no demonstrated increase in tornadoes.
There is low confidence that floods globally have become more frequent or intense.
There is even low confidence that meteorological droughts generally have gotten worse.
The ONE concrete thing you can measure and which has a reasonably robust trend is that warm days have become more frequent and cold days rarer. That's real. But that's also about it.
So every time someone writes that climate change causes more extreme weather as if it were a fact, and someone is most of the time, then it's not science being cited. It's a model. Or an attribution study that assumes the model's answer as its starting point and then calculates a probability change within the model's own boundaries.
Or put another way.
It's a circular construction dressed up as a news headline.
Take then the failed predictions about the Arctic. Peter Wadhams, professor at CAMBRIDGE, repeatedly predicted that the Arctic would be ice-free in summer by 2015 or 2016 at the latest. Al Gore cited earlier projections and suggested several times between 2007 and 2009 that we could be ice-free at the North Pole in summer by 2013, 2014, possibly 2015. British climate researcher David Viner famously said in The Independent in March 2000 that snow in winter would soon be a rare and exciting event, and that children soon wouldn't know what snow was. My son has seen snow every single winter of his life. Arctic sea ice in 2024 and 2025 lies approximately where it lay in 2007. It's falling, but it's not falling as predicted, and it's not falling at a pace that justifies the language being used about it.
The list is longer than that. Glacier National Park in the US had to quietly remove its signs in 2019 with the text "These glaciers will be gone by 2020". The Maldives according to a UN projection from 1988 should have disappeared in 2018, but right now they're building new airports... AT SEA LEVEL... (anyone can deduce from that what they will, but it's hard to imagine an insurance company that would insure this if there's a prospect of... yes, you understand). 50 million climate refugees by 2010 was an official UN projection from 2005. They never appeared. The permafrost that according to many researchers' models should have collapsed in Siberia. The Sahara that should have marched up through Spain. One prediction after another, stated with a certainty that in hindsight seems almost religious.
Or not almost.
Because that's precisely what this is.
It's not science in the classical sense of something being claimed, tested, falsified and adjusted. It's statements of faith with scientific grammar. The pattern is constant. A prediction is made with great moral weight. It fails. The prediction is reframed as if it was just a possibility, a risk assessment, a scenario. A new prediction is made further out in the future. It gets the same moral weight. Guilt and indulgence are redistributed. And anyone who points to the basic pattern gets called a denier.
Hans von Storch, German climate researcher and former lead author for the UN climate panel, has said it the only way it can be said.
"Climate anxiety is a European and especially Northern European phenomenon. It's not the conclusion of science. It's a cultural and religious condition we've laid over science. And it can't be borne by what we've actually measured."
This is where the entire construction reveals itself. The climate agenda contains all elements from a law religion. The guilt, a common hereditary sin called carbon. The indulgence, climate quotas and compensations that don't change physical reality but prove piety. The shame, the look you get when you order steak at a restaurant in Copenhagen from the next table in 2026. The dogma, "consensus", which can't be tested without you being heretical. The rituals, sorting, electric car, heat pump, plant milk. LEGUMES! The absolute truth, which must not be questioned or discussed. And the holy scriptures, the IPCC's reports, read by none and cited by all.
The difference between a law religion and a living spiritual tradition is that the law religion cannot bear doubt.
We know it from another place in our time, where - if you challenge it - a fatwa is issued over you.
Because a law religion must defend itself constantly, because it doesn't stand by its own openness. And that's precisely what we see.
The climate debate cannot have sceptics. It can ONLY have deniers and believers. That's not a scientific language. It's an inquisitorial language.
The real problem isn't whether the earth has gotten a degree warmer. It has. The real problem is that a particular cultural structure has taken science hostage to drive a political project that couldn't otherwise be sold.
Programmable digital money. 255 grams of meat per week per Dane. Global carbon tribunals. Centralisation of energy with the state apparatus. Taxation of the strong, subsidisation of the weak, all of it wrapped in a moral framework that makes resistance into sin.
And the most expensive price isn't the money.
The most expensive price is paid by the young.
Because an entire generation has grown up with a constant anxiety bombardment from kindergarten to university about a planet in flames, about species dying, about oceans suffocating, about a future that's lost.
That's not a message that lifts people. It's a message that scrapes the bottom of their meaning. We get young people who don't want children because they think the world is ending. We get young people medicated for anxiety that has largely been installed by their own public sector. We get a birth rate that's falling, a fertility that's collapsing, and a future that wavers not because the climate is changing, but because humanity has lost the right to believe in something to live for.
THAT is the real catastrophe, and it's not measured in degrees.
And let me finally say it straight out, so no one needs to put words in my mouth.
The climate is changing. It always has, and it's doing so now too, and part of the rise since the industrial revolution is due to humanity. That's not where the dispute lies. The dispute lies in what we do with that knowledge, how far we dare stretch it, how much of the modelled we dare sell as measured, and how much moral and political weight we dare place on projections that have CONSISTENTLY been wrong.
To be sceptical and realist is not to deny the thermometer. It's to insist that THE THERMOMETER (the measurable) and THE SIMULATION (the modelled) are not the same kind of statement - AND that the first CANNOT lend its credibility to the second without science beginning to crumble from within.
So when you next time get a message from someone who has copied their answer from ChatGPT, you can do the test yourself.
Read the sentence again. Ask yourself whether it says "we have measured", or whether it says "the models predict". Ask yourself whether the statement can be falsified. Whether there exists an observation that would make the writer say that so I was actually wrong on that one.
If the answer is no, then we're no longer talking about science.
Then we're talking about a faith.
To say this is not denial, it's precisely the opposite.
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Happy Monday evening, friends. 🌞