When I was in grade school, I remember my teachers warning us about acid rain, global warming, and the hole in the ozone layer. They told me the state of Florida would be underwater, as would coastal cities. The polar ice caps were going to melt and we would all starve. The planet was dying every few years.
Now I'm 43, I'm going to guess most of my elementary school teachers are either retired or dead, and Florida is not underwater. The planet has not died, and every single prediction from the so-called climate crowd has failed to come true. Rather than admitting what we all know — that it's all ideological — the climate scientists simply said the communist climate change "solutions" worked.
For decades, climate scientists said climate change was apocalyptic. It never was, as new UN scenarios prove. Scientists knew this and pushed a falsified scenario anyway. Now exposed, the scientists are falsely claiming that it was their policies that averted catastrophe. pic.twitter.com/og9t7CLPoz
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) September 3, 2026
In some ways, I admire the absolute audacity of these people. They got everything wrong, tried to force "green" policies down our throats to lower our standard of living and push communism, and then took credit for the fact none of their doom-and-gloom predictions came true.
Climate policies saved the world from catastrophic warming, say leading climate scientists. On September 1, a consortium that produces analyses for the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released new scenarios. They say the new worst-case scenario is just 3.3…
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) September 3, 2026
Here's more from Shellenberger:
Climate policies saved the world from catastrophic warming, say leading climate scientists. On September 1, a consortium that produces analyses for the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released new scenarios. They say the new worst-case scenario is just 3.3 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100 over pre-industrial temperatures. That’s down from 4.6 to 4.9 degrees of the last three generations of climate scenarios used by the IPCC. “Our business-as-usual projection of 3C of warming – rather than 4 or 5C – is a testament to the progress in global decarbonization over the last few decades,” wrote climate scientists Zeke Hausfather, Glen Peters, and Piers Forster back in May.
Others agreed. Chris Smith, a modeler at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis who helped build the new scenarios, told Carbon Brief that “back in 2010, RCP8.5 wasn’t an implausible future, we’ve now made it an implausible future.” Gavin Schmidt, the longtime director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, argued that scenarios shifted “in light of what we (as a society) are doing,” so that “we have already done things and so ‘business’ is no longer ‘usual.’” Robert Vautard, cochair of the IPCC working group on physical science, said the old high scenarios “assumed no climate policies,” while “there ARE now many climate policies in many countries, developed in particular with the Paris Agreement signed in 2016.”
Remember, Rush Limbaugh warned decades ago that after the fall of the Berlin Wall, communists would rebrand themselves under the environmentalist movement. That's why there's no daylight between green policy and Karl Marx. They proved him right, and now they're trying to say they managed to control the climate by forcing these policies down our throats.
When the old hysterical, pearl-clutching scenarios — treated for years our inevitable future in news headlines, classrooms, and policy memos — became impossible to defend, the same institutions did not say, “Our bad.” They said the policies they demanded had already saved us, like magic. It turns every failed catastrophic prediction into proof that their agenda worked, and it turns every demand for cheaper energy, nuclear power, adaptation, or simple skepticism into a malicious sabotage of a plan that never had to happen.
