I'd actually been planning to post something else this evening. But since we're already out in territory that deals with deep faith, let's just go ahead and start the series that over the coming period will deal with 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 whisper of moral outrage in the tone, and inside the actual text 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 were the same thing as the amount of truth.
In the past year, many messages are directly copied from ChatGPT.
I don't really have anything against that. The new tools can help say what you yourself might struggle to put into words - 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 first yourself, and just use them as an oracle you consult to get confirmation of what you already believe, then the answer comes out accordingly.
Regardless. It always writes politely. And delivers a well-meaning, neatly constructed answer with many little emojis in front of each point, forceful in the way pure structures can be. And that's exactly 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 on the subject, 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 mixes two things together that aren't the same. The most recent answer was about climate, and here precisely those two things are mixed together that are just as often mixed together journalistically. Or whatever we should call what we read in the media these days.
It mixes what we have measured. And what we have modeled.
Together.
And here we can begin. Because that's the central confusion in the entire climate agenda - and The Climate Narrative - and it's so ingrained in the language that most people no longer notice it. CO2 has risen. That's measured. The global average temperature has risen about 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 concerns themselves with 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 journalism and politicians and the TV host - imperceptibly onward without changing register, and suddenly it's about sea level rise, extreme weather, ecosystems out of balance, coastal cities that must move, agriculture becoming more unstable, gulf streams that could collapse and Europe that could suddenly get a completely different climate. The words flow, the sentences resemble each other, and the reader doesn't notice that we've now traveled from the thermometer over to the simulation. From the measured over to the modeled.
From science to scenario.
And when you look closer at the modeled, the remarkable thing happens every time. The models have been wrong. Consistently. Throughout my entire lifetime.
Let's begin with the most fundamental thing.
James Hansen stood before the American Congress in June 1988, a scorching summer day which he himself later admitted he had chosen on purpose, and presented three scenarios for the planet's temperature development. Scenario A was business as usual. That's what we've actually lived in, actually a bit worse, because CO2 emissions have risen a bit more than Hansen himself expected. His model predicted under that scenario a temperature increase that was approximately double what we've actually seen. That's not a small deviation. That's a fundamental error in the climate sensitivity in his model - that is, 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 predictions.
That doesn't mean Hansen was a fool. It means he modeled a system he didn't fully understand, and that reality has consistently landed 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. That's one of the few things that's actually been measured. Global sea level rise through the 20th century sits at about 1.7 millimeters per year in the best reconstructions from tide gauges. Since 1993, when satellite measurements took over, the rate sits around 3.1 to 3.4 millimeters per year. That's a rise, yes. It's also a rate that's not historically unprecedented. Similar rates have been 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 centimeters of sea level rise by mid-century, he didn't just miss. He missed by more than ten times - on the low end!
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, hard 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 modeled.
Then there's 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 on extremes, you find something that stands in screaming contrast to 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 that has a reasonably robust trend is that hot 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 said 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. The English 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 would soon not know what snow was. My son has seen snow every single winter of his life. Arctic sea ice in 2024 and 2025 sits approximately where it sat 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 and slowly 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 by 2018, but right now they're building new airports... AT SEA LEVEL.. (everyone 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 materialized. The permafrost that according to many researchers' models should have collapsed in Siberia. The Sahara that should have migrated up through Spain. One prediction after another, stated with a certainty that in hindsight seems almost religious.
Or not almost.
Because that's exactly what this is.
It's not science in the classical sense that something is claimed, tested, falsified and adjusted. It's articles 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 out the fundamental pattern gets called a denier.
Hans von Storch, German climate researcher and former lead author for the UN climate panel, has said it in the only way it can be said.
"Climate anxiety is a European and especially Northern European phenomenon. It's not science's conclusion. It's a cultural and religious condition we've laid over science. And it can't be supported 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 original sin called carbon. The indulgence, climate quotas and compensations that don't change physical reality but prove piety. The shame, that 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 restrained or discussed. And the holy scriptures, 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 constantly defend itself, because it doesn't stand by its own openness. And that's exactly what we see.
The climate debate cannot have skeptics. It can ONLY have deniers and believers. That's not scientific language. That's 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 otherwise couldn't be sold.
Programmable digital money. 255 grams of meat per week per Dane. Global carbon tributes. Centralization of energy with the state apparatus. Taxation of the strong, subsidization of the weak, all of it wrapped in a moral frame 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 bombardment of anxiety 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. That's a message that scrapes the bottom of their meaning. We get young people who won't have children because they think the world is ending. We get young people who are medicated for anxiety that has largely been installed by their own public sector. We get a birth rate that's falling, fertility that's collapsing, and a future that wavers not because climate is changing, but because humans have 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 plainly, so no one needs to put words in my mouth.
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 humans. 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 modeled we dare sell as measured, and how much moral and political weight we dare place on projections that have CONSISTENTLY been wrong.
To be skeptical and realist is not to deny the thermometer. It's to insist that THE THERMOMETER (the measurable) and THE SIMULATION (the modeled) are not the same kind of statements - 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's 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 person writing say that then I was actually wrong about that.
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.
❤️🔥🪽
Good Monday evening, friends. 🌞
