The Green Paradigm Is Shifting Fast

On November 5, 2025 voters sent the message that they’re sick of high gas prices, government diktats about what kind of cars they have to drive, billions in subsidies to “green renewable” energy industries, and EVs, and hectoring virtue-signaling from snooty elites about “settled science” and climate change “deniers.” The winds of change have set the “green” paradigm tottering.

What happened? Recently the Wall Street Journal’s Barton Swaim wrote,  “The possibility that an entire academic discipline, climate science, could have gone badly amiss by groupthink and self-flattery wasn’t thought possible. In many quarters this orthodoxy still reigns unquestioned.” But this statement begs the question that the more accurate name for “climate change,” ––Anthropogenic Catastrophic Global Warming (ACGW)–– reflects true science, which has “gone wildly amiss” because of “groupthink and “self-flattery” and other human frailties.

In fact, the real problem is the claim that, as the honest name above says, CO2 emissions from humans will eventually heat the atmosphere to the point that it becomes uninhabitable. But this is not a scientific fact established by the empirically based scientific method, but a dicey hypothesis. We simply do not have a thorough enough understanding of the complexity of global climate over time and space. For example, we don’t know precisely how water vapor in the atmosphere, the biggest greenhouse gas, interacts with CO2, or how it contributes to cyclic cooling and warming.

These gaps in our models and computer simulations have been exposed by many physicists, to whom we should listen rather than “climate scientists.” For example, MIT professor of atmospheric science Richard Lindzen, and Princeton emeritus professor of physics William Happer, wrote  in 2021, “We are both scientists who can attest that the research literature does not support the claim of a climate emergency. Nor will there be one. None of the lurid predictions — dangerously accelerating sea-level rise, increasingly extreme weather, more deadly forest fires, unprecedented warming, etc. — are any more accurate than the fire-and-brimstone sermons used to stoke fanaticism in medieval crusaders.”

The weakness of the “science,” then, makes not just “groupthink” and “self-flattery” possible, but also politicization, the fear-mongering of apocalyptic scenarios, and old-fashioned greed fed by government subsidies, tax breaks, and grants. Worse are the mandates to eliminate carbon-based energy and replace it with intermittent energy from windmills and solar panels, even though the infrastructure needed to store and deliver electricity to cover down times, is many decades from becoming a reality. This is a huge problem for the warmists, since those “clean, renewable” but intermittent energy sources require back-up reserves of electricity generated by natural gas and coal.

So how did ACGW gain such traction given its lack of any scientific bona fides? As with any issue that relies on claims of science, the lack of familiarity with how science works has increased among our students over the postwar decades, who leave K-12 schooling with globally pathetic levels of proficiency in science and mathematics.

Take the popular claim that ACGW is “settled science.” Such a statement violates the protocols of the scientific method, which physicist Richard Feynman defines as “a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty—a kind of leaning over backwards.  For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid—not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked—to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.”

Or as the theorist of the scientific method Karl Popper put it more bluntly, “The method of science is the method of bold conjectures and ingenious and severe attempts to refute them.” Yet those doing just that regarding the claims of ACGW are met with epithets like “denier,” a sly slur borrowed from “holocaust denier,” and professional ostracizing and “cancellation.” There’s nothing “scientific” about such responses to challenges.

But it’s not just bad science or scientism that explains the “green” energy cult, itself an offshoot of romantic environmentalism. Ancient myths that have been part of Western culture for millennia also have influenced the way we think about the natural world and our place in it. One, the myth of the Golden Age, has been especially pervasive. This explanation of the human condition posits a simpler time in the past during which humans lived in harmony with nature, which like a benevolent mother provided us all we need to survive and flourish. People lived communally, without law, class distinctions, rulers, technology, wealth, or private property, which are all the seeds of war, slavery, conquest, greed, and suffering.

Today these mythic motifs and ideals saturate modern environmentalism, including hypotheses like ACGW, and policies like the protection of animal species threatened with extinction, even at the expense of human well-being. Popular culture has been filled with these ideas, from Disney cartoons to movies that feature American Indians as Noble Savages and peaceful environmentalists, contrary to their actual history. Other exotic ethnicities likewise are labeled by this same Western cliché.

Moreover, as historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin writes, these mythic residues like the Noble Savage have political uses: “The notion that somewhere whether in a real or imagined sociey, man dwells in his natural state, is at the heart of primitivist theories; it is found in various guises in every anarchist and popramme of the last hundred years, and has deeply affected Marxism and the vast variety of youth movements with radical or revolutionary goals.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-green-paradigm-is-shifting-fast/