I soon realised the effect was real but the alarm was overdone, that feedback effects were exaggerated in the models. The activists who took over the climate debate, often with minimal understanding of climate science, competed for attention by painting ever more catastrophic pictures of future greenhouse warming. They altered the name to ‘climate change’ so they could blame it for blizzards as well as heatwaves. Then they inflated the language to ‘climate emergency’ and ‘climate crisis’, even as projections of future warming came down. ‘A top climate scientist is warning climate change will wipe out humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years,’ tweeted Greta Thunberg in 2018.

Source: New Zealand Herald February 01, 2026 09:40 UTC