Rick Moran writes for PJMedia.com about a welcome shift in the climate debate.
The religion of climate alarmism is in decline. The election of Donald Trump, along with high-profile defections from the climate alarmist priesthood, has begun to alter the debate over climate change.
Trump’s election brought to Washington cadres of climate change realists who are transforming the U.S. energy sector. Let’s hope they’re not too late. The Biden crackdown on fossil fuels and the continued demonization of nuclear power have put the United States behind the eight ball on energy. With the massive increase in demand for electricity going hand-in-hand with the artificial intelligence revolution, it’s an open question whether or not we can keep pace with the electrical needs of AI data centers and other infrastructure to maintain the momentum of change.
The last year has seen some extraordinary changes in the debate over climate change. The counterrevolution is being led by what the mainstream media calls “climate deniers” (a deliberate takeoff of “Holocaust deniers”) but can more accurately be referred to as “climate realists.”
Public policy expert Roger Pielke, the environmental scientist Steven Koonin, Judith Curry, the former chair of Georgia Tech’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, the Danish political scientist Bjorn Lomborg, and Michael Shellenberger, the former activist and author of Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, among others, questioned the orthodoxy. They didn’t deny that the climate was changing. Their sin was in not catastrophizing climate change.
The Free Press’s Peter Savodnik writes that “they disagreed about the extent to which the warming was ‘anthropogenic,’ or man-made, and they criticized the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and 2015 Paris Agreement and proposals like the Green New Deal, which they considered excessive at best, and probably counterproductive.”
For this apostasy, those scientists, science journalists, and others were banished.
