Sometimes it takes a while for rigorous data-based statistical research to catch up to what anyone with eyes to see can intuit for themselves. I present to you the latest instance of this pattern, as evidenced in climate research…

Waaaayy back in 2020, I wrote about the relentlessly catastrophic bias – not so much of the technical researchers behind the IPCC’s conclusions (at least, not all of them) – but of all those in the chain of ‘interpretation’ and dissemination to the public of their findings, beginning with the Summary for Policymakers (SPM), through to the media, and finally the activists.

I said:

Bjorn Lomborg’s radical approach is to take as gospel all the conclusions of the IPCC, and to build on the promise of reason made at its foundation. Importantly, the IPCC’s climate predictions are typically less catastrophist than portrayed by activists and used in the media (where journalists tend to cherry-pick the outliers from the model runs).

Now there is just the kind of independent peer-reviewed research that lives up to the promise of scientific rigour, from the US-based National Bureau of Economic Research (founded in 1920):

Public summaries of IPCC climate assessments lean toward the more severe end of the technical evidence. The pattern appears at two stages: the IPCC’s lead authors and member governments produce the SPM from the Technical Summary (TS), and newspapers then cover the SP …. both stages systematically shift toward the more severe end of the source while staying inside the IPCC’s accepted scientific ranges. The shift comes mainly from emphasising higher-impact magnitudes within reported ranges, less from uncertainty compression, and almost none from selecting worst-case emissions scenarios.

(From Galiani et al, 2026, Divergence in Climate Change Communication: LLM-Based Evidence from the IPCC and the Press.)

The mass media at least has an excuse – fear sells papers. If it bleeds it leads, is an ancient dictum. Several publications have put climate catastrophism at the heart of their business models is only the most extreme manifestation. But those preparing the SPM have no such excuse.

In my 2020 paper, A Descent into Sceptics’ Hell, I was looking for a way to describe the sequential steps in the drive towards catastrophism and landed on the metaphor of the hero’s descent through the circles of Hell in Inferno. Not straight-forward, not scientific, true; but sometimes insight needs prose before correlations, and indeed poetry, borrowed in this case from Clive James’ translation of Dante’s masterwork.

This is what drove my anger at the manipulative behaviour behind the creation of the most extreme scenario, RCP8.5.

The IPCC and UN panjandrums would say ‘oh but it’s only one of the models’, fully in the knowledge it would be the one cherry-picked by media and activists.

Thus, I commissioned Emeritus Professor Aynsley Kellow to document that sordid saga (in 2024 he wrote ‘so embarrassingly overcooked and unrealistic that even mainstream climate scientists pointed this out’.)

Now, admittedly, I do also have problems with systematic biases in climate research and the gatekeepers of climate research and funding (and some of the IPCC’s technical working groups), as also described in my paper, but the core point is that even if you 100 per cent believe that Anthropogenic Global Warming is an important risk to humankind and the planet, then to make a meaningful contribution to public policy you have to correct for the catastrophist bias of media and public discourse (and indeed the statist bias of government policy makers). Politicians (hey Teals, I’m looking at you) saying ‘trust the science’ are usually just relying on whatever they’ve been reading in the Guardian or the New York Times or, god forbid, the Economist.

You certainly should not be doing what activist educators are doing right now, which is to cherry-pick the scariest and most catastrophic scenarios to present to children, a practice now driving unprecedented rates of childhood climate anxiety (as child psychologist, Clare Rowe, has pointed out).

And now, as we know, the IPCC is finally walking back RCP8.5 (it is ‘officially dead’), but the damage is done, and the catastrophist bias remains.

I know it is only a committed core of independent thinkers and scientists who wish to contest the science of climate change, because it is hard work and relies on technical skills. But the phenomenon of catastrophism is within the human realm and is as old as civilisation. Many more citizens can make their own judgements, and increasingly they are doing so.

The stories of Henny Penny/Chicken Little we learnt in childhood (or used to), are just written version of much older folk tales. There is an emerging body of survey evidence now that across the West there is persistence in proportions who will say they believe in AGW, but its salience as an issue (who cares about it) and the willingness to bear economic burdens (e.g. destroy the economy in pursuit of ‘solutions’) is plummeting.

Heightened states of fear and anxiety driven by catastrophist takes on climate change cannot be maintained forever, before some balance returns.

So, the NBER paper – that my colleague Cian Hussey put me on to – only confirms what I had already observed, but if that wakes a few more people up to what’s going on, then it’s all for the good.