In late June, the prestigious Foreign Policy journal published an article by Jason Bordoff and Noah Kaufman of Columbia University’s Centre on Global Energy Policy under the arresting headline: ‘Doomsday Climate Scenarios Were Wrong. That Doesn’t Help Europe.’ The timing is significant. The piece appears after the IPCC’s own modelling community had formally declared RCP8.5 — the most extreme emissions pathway that has underpinned virtually every headline climate projection, every Net Zero urgency claim, and every green policy justification for the past two decades — to be “implausible”.

Bordoff and Kaufman, to their credit, acknowledge that critics of climate alarmism have a point. Too many advocates treated worst-case scenarios as likely outcomes. Too much apocalyptic language outran the evidence. President Biden’s 2022 declaration that “climate change is literally an existential threat to our nation and to the world”, they concede, overstated the case. You might think this admission would occasion some reflection on the institutions, models and political programmes built on that discredited foundation. You would be wrong.

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