Revenge of the Climate Realists

The Free Press, Peter Savodnik, 12.11.25

For years, those who questioned the calamity of climate change were treated like pariahs. Now, their day of vindication has come.

For years, those who questioned the calamity of climate change were treated like pariahs. Now, their day of vindication has come.By Peter Savodnik12.11.25 —U.S. PoliticsU.S. Politics

Breaking news, deep investigations, and eye-opening commentary that favor no party.Roger Pielke Jr., a public-policy expert who had studied the intersection of politics and climate science, had been battling the prophets of doom for years. Those who insisted we were on the brink of civilizational collapse. Mass death. A biblical confrontation with ourselves that would out-Flood the Flood.

But it was his argument that the rising cost of natural disasters had no tie to greenhouse gases that cost him his career.

In February 2015, Congressman Raúl Grijalva announced an investigation into Pielke’s climate research, sending letters to several universities suggesting that faculty members, including Pielke, who taught at the University of Colorado, were secretly working for energy companies.“Companies with a direct financial interest in climate and air quality standards,” Grijalva wrote to the universities, are behind “research that influences state and federal regulations and shapes public understanding of climate science.”

“Pretty much all the invitations to workshops and speaking engagements were canceled,” Pielke told me. “People were saying, ‘I’d love to support you, but I’m afraid they’ll come after me, too.’ ”

It was upsetting but hardly shocking: Even though Pielke agreed global warming was a big problem, he was skeptical of the “catastrophizing” that has gripped the scientific establishment and the elites for the last decade.

“Our ability to live is what’s at stake,” former vice president Al Gore declared in his 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth.

Soon, “climate change would move beyond man’s control,” the Nobel Prize Committee chairman warned while awarding Gore the Nobel Peace Prize the following year.

To question any of the science behind the emotion was to invite disdain, marginalization, outrage. That was Roger Pielke’s crime.

In the next few decades, “every place on Earth—the temperature will be hotter than it’s ever been,” environmental activist Bill McKibben said in 2013.

We are “the last generation that can do something,” President Barack Obama insisted while addressing the 2015 climate change summit in Paris.

“You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words!” Greta Thunberg thundered while addressing world leaders in 2019.

And on and on.

At the time, it was hard to imagine that one day the fury would ebb.

To question any of the science behind the emotion was to invite disdain, marginalization, outrage. That was Roger Pielke’s crime. He had clashed with President Obama’s science adviser, John Holdren. And Grijalva, apparently taking his cue from the White House, wanted to know if Pielke was secretly funded by Big Oil.

Pielke vehemently denied the accusations. But at the University of Colorado and across the academic world, his exit was met with quiet approval. “No one on my campus talked to me about any of the events,” Pielke recalled. “I only heard from the university lawyers. For me, that was one of the strangest aspects of it. The department chair, the dean, the provost—it would have been a great chance for the university to stand up for academic freedom, but that wasn’t in the cards.

“It was the announcement of the investigation that was the point,” Pielke added.

The Democratic probe ultimately pushed Pielke out of climate research and into a new field of study: the governance of sports organizations.

They had been promising for two decades that the end was near—that Greenland would melt, and the Amazon would shrivel up, and sub-Saharan Africa would turn into a perma-desert, and New York City would be swallowed up by the Atlantic while climate refugees from the global South invaded Europe.

A handful of voices—including 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 doubt that the globe was warming, but 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.

It wasn’t just Pielke who had paid for questioning the dogma.

After a prominent Pennsylvania State University climatologist called climatologist Curry a “serial climate disinformer” in a 2013 HuffPost piece, she “began planning my exit strategy from academia,” she told me. Koonin, who formerly worked in the Obama administration, said he was stung when, in 2021, Scientific American said he was a “a crank who’s only taken seriously by far-right disinformation peddlers.” (The magazine declined to publish Koonin’s response.) Shellenberger said he had been “censored” by Facebook in 2020, when it slapped a “partly false” rating on his article: “On Behalf of Environmentalists, I Apologize for the Climate Scare”—prompting Shellenberger to write an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg.

The old guard called them “deniers” or “denialists,” Shellenberger said, because it made them sound “fascist-adjacent.” “It links you with the Holocaust,” he told me. “I think it’s a very deliberate strategy.”

And then, over the past year, almost imperceptibly, a sea change started and the outsiders were no longer on the fringe.

The first unmistakable sign that the contours of the debate were shifting came in late January, during the Energy and Natural Resources Committee’s hearing for Donald Trump’s nominee for Energy Secretary, Chris Wright.

Wright, an MIT-trained mechanical engineer who previously founded a fracking company, calls himself a “climate realist”—he agrees climate change is real but supports developing new energy technologies, not capping fossil fuels.

Two Democrats on the committee—John Hickenlooper and Michael Bennet, both from Colorado—supported Wright, noting that they didn’t always agree with him but adding that he “believes in science” and American “energy independence.”

The old guard called them “deniers” or “denialists,” Michael Shellenberger said, because it made them sound “fascist-adjacent.” “It links you with the Holocaust,” he told me. “I think it’s a very deliberate strategy.”

Then, in April, the Council on Foreign Relations—the beating heart of the foreign-policy establishment—launched its Climate Realism Initiative, which aims to “leverage technology and finance” to rein in warming in “a way that spurs U.S. competitiveness.” (In a recent TED Talk, Gore dismissed climate realism, portraying it as a pet project of the energy companies.)

Six months later, Bill Gates, whose foundation had spent billions combating climate change, shifted his tone: “Although climate change will have serious consequences—particularly for people in the poorest countries—it will not lead to humanity’s demise. People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future.”

Canada’s Liberal prime minister Mark Carney, who once championed net-zero carbon emissions as the UN’s Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance, soon after introduced a budget seeking to revivify the country’s liquefied natural gas sector while eliminating anti-“greenwashing” measures favored by his predecessor, Justin Trudeau.

Even UN Secretary-General António Guterres is sounding more restrained these days.

A year ago, at a UN climate summit in oil-rich Azerbaijan, Guterres warned that we face a “ticking clock”—adding that “we are in the final countdown to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius.”

But last month, the secretary-general conceded that it was now inevitable that we would exceed the 1.5-degree threshold. Instead of warning of any looming catastrophes, he was now talking about ushering in a new era of “clean energy.”

Lomborg, the political scientist, told me: “I believe that we are witnessing a broader, more balanced reassessment of climate change.”

The reassessment was driven by several factors—starting with the all-important fact that we were still here.

“We see no long-term trends in most extreme weather events,” Steven Koonin, a theoretical physicist who spent most of his career at Caltech, said.

The number of hurricanes had plateaued.

There were not more tornadoes or cyclones or dust bowls or floods.

The wildfires that had ravaged California, Oregon, and much of South America could not be blamed on warming, although climate scientists did say climate change exacerbated their effects.

Even UN Secretary-General António Guterres is sounding more restrained these days.

Nor had there been any “accelerated sea-level rise,” Shellenberger said, “and island atolls—89 percent of them have either grown or stayed the same size.”

Pielke added that emissions had stabilized, as coal use had declined.

“With the exception of China and India, global coal consumption peaked about 15 years ago,” Pielke said. That’s because we are producing more innovative energy than ever, with a shift toward natural gas and nuclear.

Looking to the future, Koonin said: “What you’re going to see is the small nuclear reactors—let’s say a tenth of the size of the older ones. You build them in a factory, and then you put them on a train or a truck and move them to where they go. They’re all the same design, so the licensing is a lot less burdensome.”

The new thinking—that climate change was bad but not that bad—reflected the political sea change in Washington.

“The election of President Trump was an important trigger for this reassessment,” Judith Curry said in an email. “He effectively gave other governments the green light to slow down or even drop their ambitions for net-zero.”

Curry and Koonin were co-authors of a recently released Department of Energy climate change report that argued, among other things, that “models and experience suggest that CO2-induced warming might be less damaging economically than commonly believed, and excessively aggressive mitigation policies could prove more detrimental than beneficial.”

The new politics dovetailed with the rise of artificial intelligence, which, Koonin and Pielke said, was about to dramatically ratchet up energy demand with its data centers.

“Reality has bitten,” Koonin said.

Pielke added: “We’re going to need a lot more power going forward.” Meaning, more wind, plus space-based solar power and batteries with greater storage capacity. And, above all, more nuclear.

The public appears open to that: 69 percent of Republicans and 52 percent of Democrats would like to see more nuclear power.

“The future looks great for energy,” Pielke said.

The new thinking around climate comes at the same time that progressives—including Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, the authors of the highly influential 2025 book Abundance—rethink decades of regulation that have limited construction of housing, transportation and, of course, power plants.

The new thinking—that climate change was bad but not that bad—reflected the political sea change in Washington.

Marc Dunkelman, a political historian at Brown University and the author of the recently published Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back, told me that the “governing infrastructure”—and mindset—is only slowly catching up with reality.

“The dirty secret is that the old notion that we need to abandon the economic advantage of using cheap, dirty energy to satisfy the moral imperative of taking advantage of clean, expensive energy doesn’t really apply anymore,” Dunkelman wrote in an email. “We’ve got the technology to make clean energy cheap.”

Even Greta Thunberg, who sailed across oceans in search of climate justice, seems to have given up: In the past year, she ditched the environment in exchange for a keffiyeh. Her new cause is Gaza.

The reassessment was anticipated by a famous 1962 book written by the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Koonin said.

Central to Kuhn’s argument is the insight that scientific progress does not unfold the way we might imagine it happening—in laboratories filled with bespectacled, data-focused scientists immune to politics and culture. On the contrary, the people who do science—not only the researchers, but those who administer their departments and universities, the philanthropists and billionaires who fund their research, the influencers and politicians who align themselves with it and talk about it and build their brands around it—have a vested interest in whatever hypothesis or scientific theory they have constructed their careers around.

Alas, progress often happens only after a very gradual accretion of counter-evidence builds and there’s a “paradigm shift,” as Kuhn noted. Sometimes that process stretches across decades. Or centuries.

Exhibit A: Copernicus overthrowing the 1,400-year-old geocentric model of the universe. Or, Koonin said, eugenics, or Soviet agriculture, a.k.a. Lysenkoism—both of which were all the rage. Until they weren’t.

Or—maybe, just maybe—climate alarmism.

“The whole world believed these sciencey ideas and then came to understand that they were just wrong,” Koonin said. “People get invested in their careers, their reputations, their businesses, and it’s very hard to let those go—you have to wait until people die.”

It was easy to forget how many lives had been turned upside down by the alarmists.

A 2021 study published in The Lancet found that 60 percent of young people—ages 16 to 25—suffered from what has been called eco-depression or eco-anxiety. A 2025 survey published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reported that one in five people ages 16 to 24 did not want to bring children into the world, given the state of the climate.

Depression, domestic violence, lethargy, suicide—they were all, apparently, compounded by rising temperatures and melting ice caps and, perhaps more importantly, the belief that these things were being driven by huge, inexorable forces.

Jonathan Rinderknecht, the 29-year-old man suspected of starting the Palisades fire in Los Angeles, was enraged by his deeply held conviction that the people in charge were doing nothing to stop the climate apocalypse. (The fire left 12 dead, and razed nearly 7,000 buildings.)

“People should be angry,” Shellenberger said.

When I asked Curry whether any of her critics had quietly reached out to her to concede that maybe she’d had a point, she replied: “Many people have been telling me that for the past decade.” Like Lomborg, she was cautiously optimistic.

“I don’t see this as personal vindication, but rather as progress toward a more rational debate,” Lomborg said.

Of course, Shellenberger said, the decline of climate alarmism does not mean the decline of alarmism. We had segued seamlessly from the Cold War–era fear of nuclear war to the fear of overpopulation to the fear of climate change.

And now?

“Now, it’s probably going to be AI security,” Koonin said. “That’s a big one. Or maybe microplastics. It could definitely be microplastics.”

It did not help that we inhabited a supremely political moment, Pielke said. The polarization, the anger, the constant ratcheting up of our emotions—it made us more susceptible to other people’s moral crusades.

“I would not expect a reckoning,” Pielke added.

He recalled that, after news of the Grijalva investigation broke, he called the University of Maine, where he was scheduled to give a talk at the Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions—after the Democratic former Senate minority leader.

“I said, ‘I don’t know if you saw The New York Times story,’ ” Pielke said, “and they laughed and said, ‘Senator Mitchell knows how Congress works, and he looks forward to welcoming you in September.’ That kind of buoyed me.”