Over the past few years, this space has become something far more meaningful than I ever expected when I first started writing.

When I began Irrational Fear, I was coming out of a difficult place professionally. I had spent years in academia, built a career as a scientist, and then found myself increasingly at odds with the direction things were going… n…

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There is a point where science stops asking questions and starts issuing commands.

We are there.

A Canadian startup now claims it can suppress lightning to prevent wildfires. The logic is simple and increasingly familiar. Lightning ignites fires. Fires release carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide contributes to climate change. Therefore, lightning itself has be…

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The recent escalation of conflict involving Iran has triggered a familiar media cycle. Analysts warn that disruptions in the Persian Gulf could send oil prices soaring. Headlines speculate about tanker routes through the Strait of Hormuz, global supply shocks, and the economic consequences of geopolitical instability in the Middle East.

But almost immedi…

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A New Wave of Climate Headlines

Over the past several weeks a new wave of climate headlines has appeared claiming that global warming is accelerating. News outlets around the world have reported that recent temperature records indicate the planet is heating faster than scientists previously believed.

These stories all trace back to a new paper published in Geophysical Research Letters which claims that global warming has accelerated significantly during the past decade.

The conclusion spread quickly through press releases, institutional communications, and media coverage. The narrative presented to the public is straightforward: recent record temperatures are not simply the continuation of a long-term warming trend but evidence that the pace of warming itself has increased.

If that claim were correct, it would be an extremely important scientific result. Detecting an acceleration in warming would imply that the climate system is changing faster than previously understood and would inevitably intensify calls for rapid policy responses.

However, when the broader scientific literature is examined, the story becomes considerably more complicated.

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Another Paper Asked the Same Question

Just over a year ago, a separate study published in the Nature journal Communications Earth & Environment examined the same question using statistical techniques specifically designed to detect changes in trends within noisy climate datasets. After analyzing more than 170 years of global temperature records, the authors reached a very different conclusion.

They reported that no statistically detectable acceleration in global warming has occurred since the warming shift that began around 1970.

In other words, according to this analysis the recent sequence of record temperatures does not yet demonstrate that the underlying warming rate has increased. Instead, the fluctuations observed during recent years remain consistent with the long-term warming trend combined with natural variability in the climate system.

What makes this contrast remarkable is that both papers analyze the same global temperature datasets. Both are peer-reviewed publications written by experienced researchers. Both ask essentially the same scientific question.

Yet one concludes that warming is accelerating while the other concludes that the data do not yet support such a finding.

The situation is therefore unusual. This is not simply a debate about interpretation. One paper is effectively claiming that a statistically detectable acceleration exists, while the other concluded earlier that the available data are not capable of detecting such an acceleration yet. Both results cannot simultaneously be true under the same statistical assumptions.

Why This Debate Matters

Disagreements like this are not unusual in science. Different statistical approaches can sometimes lead to different interpretations of the same observations, particularly in systems as complex as Earth’s climate.

What is unusual is how the two results have been communicated outside the scientific literature. The paper, suggesting an acceleration, immediately generated headlines and media coverage. The earlier study finding no detectable acceleration, received almost none.

When only one side of a scientific debate becomes widely visible, the public is left with the impression that the science is far more settled than it actually is.

Understanding how this happens requires looking more closely at the data itself and at the methods scientists use to analyze it.

The Challenge of Measuring “Global Temperature”

Before examining the two papers in detail, it is important to understand that the entire discussion rests on a metric that is far more abstract than most people realize: global average temperature.

Temperature is fundamentally a local property influenced by altitude, geography, atmospheric circulation, ocean currents, humidity, land use, and solar radiation. The Earth does not possess a single temperature in the way a glass of water does. Instead, the climate system contains an enormous mosaic of temperatures that vary continuously across space and time.

Global temperature datasets attempt to summarize this complexity by combining measurements from weather stations, ships, buoys, and satellites into a single global average. Because direct measurements cover only a small fraction of the Earth’s surface, statistical techniques are used to estimate temperatures across vast regions where observations are sparse. As a result, the final “global temperature” value represents a statistical reconstruction of the climate system rather than a direct measurement of a physical quantity.

This does not invalidate the datasets, but it does mean that interpreting subtle changes in global temperature trends requires careful statistical analysis.

Even the IPCC acknowledges the challenge. In its Sixth Assessment Report, the IPCC notes that detecting changes in the rate of warming is difficult because internal variability in the climate system can obscure trend changes over periods of several decades.

In other words, distinguishing a true acceleration from natural variability is statistically challenging even in long observational records.

A Deeper Problem in Climate Publishing

The existence of two recent papers reaching opposite conclusions would normally trigger a healthy scientific debate about methods and assumptions. Instead, one result rapidly became a global headline while the other remained largely invisible.

As someone who has published extensively in peer-reviewed journals, I have enormous respect for the peer-review process. At its best, it serves as an essential quality control system that ensures new research is carefully examined before entering the scientific literature.

However, peer review is not immune to bias or narrative pressure. In my previous article examining a recent Atlantic circulation paper, I showed how authors sometimes ignore contradictory studies that complicate their conclusions, a practice that would not have passed the scrutiny of many traditional scientific disciplines.

When this happens, the result is not necessarily outright fraud, but it does represent a breakdown of the careful cross-checking that peer review is supposed to provide.

And that is precisely why the two warming papers deserve to be examined side by side.

In the Subscriber Section…

In the subscriber section below we will look closely at how the two papers analyze the temperature record and why they reach opposite conclusions.

We will examine the statistical adjustments used in the Geophysical Research Letters study, compare them with the changepoint detection methods used in the Nature paper, and explore why different statistical assumptions can fundamentally change the answer.

More importantly, we will walk through the figures and data presented in each paper to understand what the temperature record actually shows and how those results have been interpreted.

For readers who want to go deeper into the science rather than simply reading headlines, these detailed breakdowns are a core part of what I provide at Irrational Fear. Paid subscribers receive full access to these deep dives as well as more than 435 original articles examining the data behind today’s climate narratives.

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Over the past week, headlines have warned that the EPA has “weakened” mercury protections and that Americans will now be exposed to dangerous levels of toxic pollution.

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Over the past month, I have done something increasingly rare in public climate discourse. I stepped away from headlines, institutional summaries, and model visualizations and went back to the primary literature itself… ice cores, speleothems, marine sediments, isotope datasets, proxy methodology papers, and modern synthesis studies spanning multiple regions of the planet.

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This was not a casual review. It was a deliberate, weeks-long immersion into dozens of peer-reviewed studies across Greenland, Antarctica, Asia, the North Atlantic, and continental hydrological archives. As someone formally trained as an isotope geochemist, these records are not abstract talking points to me. They are the empirical foundation of how we reconstruct past climate in the absence of direct measurements.

And that absence of direct measurements is critical.

Reliable global surface temperature coverage is sparse before the mid-20th century. Satellite observations of atmospheric temperature extend back only a few decades. From a geological perspective, this is an extraordinarily short observational window. Yet sweeping claims about “unprecedented warming” are routinely made using this narrow slice of time, while the far longer proxy record, the only record we actually have for deep climate context, is often reduced to smoothed global averages.

If modern warming is truly unprecedented in rate and magnitude, that signal should be unmistakable across the full paleoclimate archive, not just within a short instrumental record or an aggregated global mean curve.

But after a month inside the primary literature, a very different picture emerges.

What Institutional Narratives Actually Claim

To be precise, the modern climate narrative does not merely argue that warming is occurring. It frequently asserts that recent warming is unprecedented in the historical context. The IPCC AR6 Summary for Policymakers, for example, states that global temperature increases are “unprecedented in at least the last 2000 years,” a phrase widely echoed in media coverage and institutional communications.

This framing is largely derived from hemispheric or global multiproxy reconstructions. While scientifically valuable, these reconstructions rely on spatial averaging, temporal smoothing, and standardization across diverse proxy types. By design, these methods reduce variance and suppress high-frequency regional variability.

That distinction matters because the high-resolution proxy literature, the actual ice cores, isotope records, and sediment archives often tell a far more dynamic story than smoothed global composites suggest.

A Personal Note: Why This Review Matters to Me

Long-time readers of IrrationalFear will recognize that this line of inquiry is not new in my work. Across more than 435+ articles, I have repeatedly examined proxy uncertainties, temperature reconstruction limitations, and the misuse of global average temperature as a singular climate metric.

In my earlier articles, I discussed in detail how proxy records are constructed, the assumptions embedded within them, and the resolution limits that can smooth rapid variability in ice cores and other climate archives.

As an isotope geochemist, I view climate history through δ¹⁸O curves, sediment layers, and geochemical proxies… not just modern temperature graphs. These records are messy, regional, and assumption-laden, but they are also the only empirical datasets that extend back thousands to hundreds of thousands of years.

And those records consistently show a climate system defined by variability, not stability.

A Reminder: Proxies Are Not Perfect

At the same time, we have to be honest about proxy limitations.

In one well-known cave study from Moondyne Cave in Australia that I discuss in “Science or Speculation? The Uncomfortable Truth About Climate Proxies”, the oxygen isotope signal (δ¹⁸O) in a speleothem did not track temperature in the way commonly assumed. In some intervals, the isotope signal moved opposite to instrumental temperature. Rainfall patterns and moisture source effects overwhelmed the temperature signal.

That example does not invalidate paleoclimate research. But it reminds us of something crucial… Proxy records are complex. They encode multiple environmental variables. They require interpretation.

One Foundational Example: Greenland Ice Core Variability

In the early 1990s, independently drilled Greenland ice cores — GRIP and GISP2 — revealed something extraordinary. Their oxygen isotope records showed repeated, large, and rapid climate shifts during the last glacial period. (Grootes et al., 1993)

These are not subtle variations buried in noise. They are pronounced shifts in oxygen isotope ratios corresponding to major temperature changes occurring on decadal timescales, with glacial-interglacial differences estimated on the order of 10–13°C. Even more importantly, these signals are replicated across independently drilled cores with extremely strong agreement, confirming that the variability reflects real climatic behavior rather than analytical artifact.

That single dataset alone challenges the idea of a historically stable climate suddenly experiencing unprecedented change.

But Greenland is only the beginning.

On Rates of Change: A Critical Context Often Ignored

A common argument is that past climate changes were either too slow or too regional to be comparable to modern warming. However, the high-resolution proxy record complicates this assumption.

Greenland ice cores document Dansgaard–Oeschger events involving temperature shifts of several degrees occurring over decades. Likewise, the termination of the Younger Dryas involved substantial and rapid warming in high-latitude regions. These findings demonstrate that abrupt climate shifts are not unique to the industrial era.

This does not imply that past and modern climate changes are identical in cause or global coherence. Rather, it shows that the Earth system is capable see-sawing, rapid reorganizations driven by internal variability, ocean circulation changes, and nonlinear feedbacks.

Global Averages vs Regional Climate Reality

Another issue repeatedly encountered during this month-long review is the heavy reliance on global average temperature as the primary metric of climate change. Global means are statistical constructs that smooth spatial variability and reduce extremes.

By contrast, proxy records are inherently regional and preserve the true dynamical behavior of the climate system.

Proxy archives — ice cores, speleothems, and marine sediments — also contain intrinsic smoothing due to diffusion, depositional processes, and temporal resolution limits. This means that even the large variability observed in the paleoclimate record may represent conservative estimates of actual past climate dynamics rather than exaggerated signals.

After reviewing dozens of studies across multiple proxy systems and regions, a consistent pattern emerges: abrupt climate variability is not an anomaly in Earth’s history. It is a recurring feature.

What the Full Literature Review Shows

In the subscriber section below, I walk through the primary literature directly — paper by paper, figure by figure, and region by region — including:

• Greenland ice core abrupt warming events

• Heinrich events and ocean circulation disruptions

• Bipolar seesaw climate synchronization

• Speleothem isotope records of monsoon variability

• Continental hydrological reorganizations

• Modern synthesis studies on abrupt climate dynamics

• Proxy resolution and smoothing effects that suppress variability

Subscribers also receive access to my full archive of 435+ data-driven articles analyzing climate datasets, proxy records, and geochemical evidence using primary literature rather than summaries or institutional interpretations.

If the claim that modern warming is truly unprecedented is robust, it should withstand direct comparison with the full paleoclimate record.

Below, we conduct that comparison using the literature itself.

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For more than a decade, climate policy has rested on a simple and powerful premise. Rising greenhouse gases increase radiative forcing, trap more heat, and therefore drive modern warming. From this premise flows everything from emissions caps to net-zero mandates. The logic appears straightforward. Control CO₂ and you control the climate.

But the Earth does not respond to narratives.
It responds to energy.

That distinction is not philosophical. It is physical.

In my earlier work, especially Does More CO₂ = More Heat?, I emphasized that Earth’s climate has never behaved as a simple one-variable system. Geological records repeatedly show periods where CO₂ and temperature diverge, suggesting that solar radiation, ocean circulation, cloud dynamics, and feedback processes all play critical roles in shaping climate states.

Now, a new paper examining surface solar radiation datasets over Germany introduces a result that deserves far more attention than it is currently receiving.

It finds a statistically significant increase in surface solar radiation on the order of roughly +4 W/m² per decade from 1995 to 2020 across multiple independent datasets.

That is not a temperature anomaly.
That is not a model output.
That is a direct change in energy reaching the surface.

And climate, at its core, is an energy balance problem.

The Missing Variable in the Public Conversation

When the public hears about radiative forcing, the discussion is almost always framed around greenhouse gases and outgoing longwave radiation. That framing is not wrong, but it is incomplete.

Two fundamental flows govern the climate system:
Incoming shortwave solar radiation and outgoing longwave infrared radiation.

CO₂ primarily influences the latter.
Surface solar radiation directly affects the former.

If more solar energy is reaching the surface due to changes in cloud cover, aerosol loading, or atmospheric transparency, then the surface can warm even without proportional changes in greenhouse forcing.

This is not speculative physics. It is the basic structure of the Earth’s energy budget.

In Unsettled Science: Are We Really Measuring Earth’s Energy Imbalance Accurately?, I explored how even small shifts in energy flux measured in watts per meter squared can have outsized climatic implications over time because the system integrates energy continuously, not instantaneously.

That is why the Germany dataset is so important.

It moves the discussion away from abstract attribution models and toward observed changes in energy input at the surface.

Why Germany Is a Particularly Powerful Case Study

Germany is not just another region in the dataset. It is one of the most instrumented areas in the world when it comes to radiation measurements, atmospheric monitoring, and long-term climate observations.

The new study compiles multiple gridded surface solar radiation products and finds consistent brightening trends across datasets, with values clustering around 3.8 to 4.6 W/m² per decade and strong statistical significance.

This consistency matters.

Because it suggests we are not looking at noise, measurement drift, or a single dataset artifact. We are looking at a coherent signal in incoming solar energy at the surface.

And once we translate that signal into physical units, the implications become far more profound than temperature discussions alone.

A Question That Is Rarely Asked Honestly

If surface solar radiation is increasing measurably, then a fundamental attribution question emerges.

How much of the observed warming in a highly monitored region like Germany is due to increased solar energy reaching the surface… and how much is due to greenhouse gas forcing?

That is not a rhetorical question.

Below the paywall, we will walk through the paper in detail, translate the radiation trends into energy terms, compare them directly to commonly cited global energy imbalance estimates, and explore a thought experiment:

If Germany is representative of broader brightening trends, how much of modern warming could be explained by changes in incoming solar energy rather than CO₂ alone?

Subscribers get the full quantitative breakdown and energy-based attribution discussion as well as access to over 435 unique articles that challenge simple climate narratives.

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The 2009 Endangerment Finding treated carbon dioxide as a pollutant that threatens public health and welfare. For more than a decade, that designation has functioned as the legal foundation for regulating fossil fuels, electricity generation, transportation, and much of the modern economy.

Now that the Finding is being reconsidered, it is worth stepping back from the regulatory framework and asking a much more basic scientific question.

What is the correct atmospheric concentration of CO2?

If carbon dioxide is truly a pollutant, then there must be a threshold. There must be some identifiable boundary at which CO2 shifts from being part of the natural carbon cycle to being harmful in a biological or climatic sense. If such a boundary exists, it should be visible in geology, in plant physiology, or in the empirical record of Earth’s climate.

But when we begin to examine those lines of evidence, the clarity we are promised does not appear.

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Deep Time Does Not Cooperate

In The Endangerment Finding Was Pre-Cooked, I walked through the Phanerozoic reconstruction of atmospheric CO2. Over the last 550 million years, concentrations frequently exceeded 1000 parts per million and at times reached several thousand.

Life did not collapse under those conditions. On the contrary, biodiversity expanded. Forests flourished. Marine ecosystems diversified. The idea that 400 ppm constitutes dirty air sits uneasily beside a geological record in which far higher concentrations coincided with biological abundance.

If today’s atmosphere is “endangering,” then vast stretches of Earth's history would need to be reclassified as ecologically reckless. That conclusion should at least give us pause.

In Does More CO2 = More Heat?, I also explored the complex relationship between CO2 and temperature over deep time. The geological record does not display a simple linear mapping between atmospheric concentration and climate state.

Continental configuration, ocean circulation, solar luminosity, volcanic outgassing, and feedback processes all shape global temperature. CO2 plays a role, but it is not the only control knob.

If there is an upper danger threshold, it is not obvious in deep time.

The Ice Age Constraint

The more recent record complicates things further.

In Atmospheric CO2 Concentrations of the Past and Do We Really Know the Surface Temperature or CO2 Concentration of the Past?, I discussed the proxy records and their limitations. Even accepting the ice core framework at face value, atmospheric CO2 over the past 800,000 years fluctuated between roughly 180 and 300 ppm.

Those low points coincided with massive continental ice sheets. Glacial maxima were not periods of ecological flourishing. They were periods of climatic severity and instability.

Pre-industrial levels near 280 ppm did not represent a golden age of climatic balance. They were part of a cycle of repeated glaciations driven by orbital forcing. The Earth system oscillated between ice ages lasting nearly 100,000 years and comparatively brief interglacials.

That history raises an uncomfortable possibility.

Perhaps 280 ppm was not an optimal equilibrium. Perhaps it was closer to a lower boundary of climatic stability.

The Modern Biosphere Response

Meanwhile, as CO2 rose from roughly 280 ppm to more than 420 ppm, something measurable occurred.

In Greening Earth and Booming Crops, I examined satellite evidence showing widespread increases in global leaf area. Agricultural production has expanded dramatically over the past several decades. Water use efficiency has improved under elevated CO2 conditions.

Commercial greenhouse operators routinely enrich indoor air to concentrations between 800 and 1000 ppm in order to maximize plant growth. They do not regard 280 ppm as biologically ideal.

CO2 is not a trace contaminant in plant physiology. It is the fundamental substrate of photosynthesis.

If rising CO2 were inherently degrading the biosphere, we would not expect to observe widespread greening.

The Sea Level Complication

Perhaps, then, the danger lies in the sea level.

That argument is often presented as straightforward. Higher CO2 increases radiative forcing. Higher temperatures melt ice. Melting ice raises the sea level.

But in Sea Levels Were Significantly Higher in the Mid to Late Holocene at Pre Industrial Levels of CO2, I reviewed multiple peer-reviewed reconstructions showing that regional sea levels during the mid to late Holocene were, in many places, higher than today. These highstands occurred while atmospheric CO2 remained near 260 to 280 ppm.

Evidence from the Arabian Gulf, the southwestern Atlantic, and the southeast Australian coast indicates elevated sea levels under what we now describe as safe pre-industrial concentrations.

This does not mean CO2 has no climatic influence. It does mean that sea level does not map cleanly or uniquely onto atmospheric concentration. Glacio isostatic adjustment, meltwater redistribution, and regional dynamics complicate the picture.

Once again, the boundary between safe and dangerous becomes difficult to identify.

The Asymmetry

Taken together, these observations produce a striking asymmetry.

There is clear evidence that very low CO2 concentrations coincide with biospheric stress and glacial amplification.

There is far less clarity about a specific upper danger threshold anywhere near modern levels.

And yet policy treats 280 ppm as a moral baseline.

Why?

Why was the concentration that happened to exist before industrialization elevated to the status of climatic ideal?

Below the paywall, I will attempt to answer the original question directly. Not rhetorically. Not politically. But analytically.

If the objective were maximizing biospheric productivity, minimizing glacial instability, preserving adaptability, and supporting human flourishing, what atmospheric CO2 range would we rationally choose?

Subscribers receive the full stability framework, the plant physiology constraints, the radiative forcing context, and a direct answer grounded in the evidence reviewed above.

If you would like to explore that analysis in depth, you can subscribe at IrrationalFear.com and gain access to more than 420 original articles examining climate science, energy policy, disaster trends, and regulatory overreach.

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For years on Irrational Fear, I have written about Dansgaard–Oeschger (D–O) events, abrupt climate shifts during the last glacial period when temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere surged by double-digit degrees in mere decades. I explored this in “Are We Really in an Unprecedented Time of Warming?” and again in “Are We Entering a Dansgaard–Oeschger Event?” because these events challenge a central assumption in modern climate discourse: that rapid, large-scale warming is uniquely tied to industrial CO₂ emissions.

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More recently, in “Greenland’s Ancient Melt: The Bombshell Study That Buries Climate Alarmism,” I examined new evidence showing that parts of Greenland were ice-free during the Holocene under CO₂ concentrations far below today’s levels. That work highlighted how regional warming and ice retreat can occur naturally through circulation changes and orbital forcing, independent of modern emissions narratives.

Now a newly published paper in Climate of the Past adds powerful global evidence to this pattern. Titled “A Global Analysis of Pollen-Based Reconstructions of Land Climate Changes During Dansgaard–Oeschger Events,” the study reconstructs seasonal land temperatures and plant-available moisture across hundreds of fossil pollen records between 50,000 and 30,000 years ago.

Unlike earlier analyses that focused primarily on Greenland ice cores, this reconstruction extends the D–O signal onto continents, providing a far more spatially comprehensive view of abrupt climate change.

Not a Smooth Trend… A System Reorganization

The authors confirm that the strongest warming during Dansgaard–Oeschger (D–O) events occurred in the northern extratropics, particularly Eurasia. Winter temperatures in those regions changed more dramatically than summer temperatures, indicating a reduction in seasonality rather than uniform warming. Meanwhile, the Southern Hemisphere often behaved out of phase.

This pattern is not what a simple “CO₂ knob” model would predict.

It is what circulation reorganization looks like.

And then comes the line that should prompt serious reflection:

“There was no globally consistent pattern between changes in moisture and changes in temperature.”

No consistent global relationship.

During some of the most abrupt warming episodes in the last 100,000 years, hydrology did not scale predictably with temperature.

If This Pattern Repeats

If abrupt warming episodes in the past were driven by circulation reorganizations rather than steady greenhouse amplification, and if those reorganizations produced weak and inconsistent moisture responses, then several widely held assumptions about future climate risk deserve closer scrutiny.

The authors of this new reconstruction make a quiet but consequential observation: D–O events are comparable in magnitude and rate to anticipated 21st-century warming.

In other words, we have real-world case studies of rapid warming.

And those case studies do not behave the way simplified narratives suggest.

The deeper implications of that fact extend well beyond paleoclimate curiosity. They touch on model validation, hydrological projections, and the way we design energy systems under uncertainty.

If the climate system is capable of abrupt phase shifts independent of CO₂ concentration, then resilience — not just emissions reduction — becomes a central pillar of rational planning.

That is where this new study becomes more disruptive than it first appears.

Below, I’ll break down what this means for climate model credibility, moisture–temperature assumptions, and why resilience — not just emissions reduction — must be central to energy planning.

What You Haven’t Been Told About These Events

Up to this point, we’ve only touched the surface of what this reconstruction implies.

In the full analysis below, I walk through:

• Why the moisture finding is far more destabilizing to current projections than it first appears

• How D–O warming rates compare numerically to 21st-century model scenarios

• What this means for climate model validation — and where models struggle

• How Greenland’s Holocene melt story fits into a broader pattern of natural northern amplification

• And why energy systems designed for smooth, gradual warming may be dangerously underprepared for abrupt circulation shifts

Paid subscribers also get access to over 420 archived deep-dive articles connecting paleoclimate, atmospheric dynamics, energy infrastructure, and policy risk — a body of work that mainstream climate reporting simply does not engage.

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The most important climate decision in modern U.S. history is quietly being dismantled.

According to reporting by The Wall Street Journal, the Trump administration is moving to repeal the EPA’s 2009 Endangerment Finding — the regulatory keystone that enabled fifteen years of climate rules, vehicle mandates, power-sector controls, and trillions of dollars in compliance costs.

And yet, remarkably, almost no one is talking about the science.

The public conversation is almost entirely about process: whether the repeal will survive legal challenges, whether agencies followed the correct procedures, whether industry benefits too much, and whether courts will intervene. What is missing, again, is a serious discussion of whether the Endangerment Finding was ever scientifically or legally justified in the first place.

That omission is not accidental. It is the defining feature of modern climate policy.

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A Decision Made First, Justified Later

The EPA’s Endangerment Finding followed the Supreme Court’s Massachusetts v. EPA decision, which merely allowed greenhouse gases to be considered under the Clean Air Act. It did not require the EPA to declare carbon dioxide a danger to public health or welfare. That judgment was left to the agency.

And the agency chose its answer early.

A recent investigation by the Government Accountability & Oversight Office confirms what many of us suspected at the time: the Endangerment Finding was built around a conclusion that had already been reached. The scientific process that followed was not designed to test whether CO₂ posed an endangerment, but to defend a regulatory outcome deemed politically necessary.

Oversight finding:
“…the Endangerment Finding was treated internally as a ‘decision ready to go,’ with scientific review structured around defending the outcome…”

This is the core argument I laid out in my earlier Irrational Fear piece, “Mr. Zeldin, Will You Rescue America From the EPA’s Climate Fraud?”, where I traced how a single bureaucratic determination metastasized into economy-wide control over energy and mobility. I expanded that case in “Climate Lawfare”, showing how courts later shielded massive climate spending programs rooted entirely in the Endangerment Finding’s authority.

None of this was hypothetical. It was documented. It was observable. And it was ignored.

What the Endangerment Finding Never Confronted

A genuine scientific assessment of endangerment would have required confronting inconvenient facts. The 2009 finding did not.

It never seriously addressed the role of natural recovery from the Little Ice Age, a period of unusually cold global conditions that peaked well before industrial CO₂ emissions and from which the planet has been rebounding for more than a century. Treating all post-19th-century warming as unprecedented and dangerous required quietly discarding that context.

It also failed to grapple with the net benefits of modest warming to human societies. Cold is far deadlier than heat. Agricultural productivity improves with longer growing seasons. Energy access reduces vulnerability. These realities undermine the simplistic harm narrative embedded in the finding.

Most conspicuously, the EPA excluded the benefits of CO₂ fertilization, despite mounting observational evidence, now overwhelming, that higher CO₂ concentrations have increased global leaf area, improved plant water-use efficiency, and boosted crop yields. Satellite data did not support a story of planetary decline. They supported one of widespread greening.

The Absurdity of Calling 420 ppm “Unclean Air”

Perhaps the most fundamental flaw in the Endangerment Finding is conceptual.

For most of Earth’s history, atmospheric CO₂ levels were not 280 ppm or 420 ppm, but 1,000 to more than 4,000 ppm. Life did not collapse under those conditions. It flourished. Forests expanded. Biodiversity increased. Entire ecosystems thrived.

Against that backdrop, the claim that today’s atmosphere — at roughly 0.04% CO₂ — constitutes “unclean air” collapses under minimal scrutiny. Carbon dioxide is not mercury. It is not sulfur dioxide. It is not lead. It is an essential molecule for life.

This is not an ideological statement. It is basic chemistry.

The Endangerment Finding required redefining that chemistry to make regulation possible.

Years of Writing, One Conclusion

At Irrational Fear, I have spent years examining these issues from multiple angles: disaster statistics, sea-level records, hurricane data, climate costs, adaptation, and the repeated failure of model projections to match observations. I submitted those findings formally to the EPA in my public comment supporting reconsideration of the Endangerment Finding, drawing directly on hundreds of prior analyses.

The conclusion has remained consistent: the evidence never supported a finding of endangerment.

What has changed is not the data.

What has changed is the legal and political tolerance for pretending otherwise.

Before the Paywall

If you’re new here, this piece is part of a much larger body of work. I’ve published over 420 original articles at Irrational Fear examining climate science and policy through an evidence-first lens… most of them free to read, many with deeper subscriber-only analysis.

Below the paywall, I’ll walk through exactly what the oversight documents show, how they align with years of prior analysis, and why the Endangerment Finding is now collapsing under its own weight.

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I have lived in places where electricity is not a given.

When I lived in Somalia as a young boy, power outages were routine. As the sun went down, you could hear generators turning on across the neighborhoods, one after another, as people tried to keep the lights on, keep food cold, and keep businesses running. Diesel generators weren’t symbols of excess…

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Almost every claim about a looming climate crisis rests on a single foundational assumption. We are told that scientists have a precise and reliable understanding of global temperature. We are told that we know what the planet’s temperature was in the past, that we know what it is today, and that the difference between those two numbers proves something unprecedented and dangerous is underway.

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If that assumption is wrong, or even deeply uncertain, the entire structure built on top of it becomes unstable. Climate models lose their anchor. Policy prescriptions lose their urgency. Trillion-dollar decisions begin to look far less justified.

That is why the global temperature record matters so much, and why it deserves far more scrutiny than it receives. This is not an argument against measuring temperature, but an argument for understanding how much judgment and interpretation is embedded in the number we are told to trust.

In recent years, that scrutiny has begun to expose uncomfortable cracks. Historic heatwaves quietly disappearing from national records. Extreme modern temperatures recorded next to jet engines and asphalt. Adjustments that consistently cool the past while warming the present. Individually, each issue is brushed off as technical or trivial. Taken together, they point to something far more serious.

Before getting into the details, it is worth asking a basic question.

What exactly is this metric that everything depends on?

The Metric Everything Depends On

When I speak publicly about climate science, I often begin with the longest continuous instrumental temperature record on Earth, the Central England Temperature series. It stretches back to the late seventeenth century and shows dramatic swings long before industrial emissions or modern energy use. There are periods where temperatures rose or fell more quickly than anything we observe today.

The response is always the same. England is only one region. Climate change is global, not local.

That response sounds reasonable, but it quietly shifts the discussion to a much weaker metric. Once we move away from individual observations and toward a single global average temperature, we leave the realm of direct measurement and enter the world of statistical construction.

That distinction is rarely made clear to the public.

What Global Temperature Actually Represents

The Earth does not have a single temperature. It has deserts and rainforests, oceans and mountains, cities and ice sheets. Temperature varies enormously across space and time. There is no physical instrument that measures a global average.

To produce a global temperature number, scientists combine surface weather stations with ocean measurements from ships and buoys, then use statistical techniques to fill in the vast areas where no measurements exist. This process relies heavily on assumptions about how temperature behaves across distance and time.

Much of the planet, especially the oceans and large portions of the Southern Hemisphere, had extremely sparse coverage well into the twentieth century.

Even today, the oceans dominate the global average, yet direct measurements there are limited and constantly changing in method.

Global average temperature is therefore not a simple observation. It is a constructed metric. A blend of measurements, estimates, and adjustments.

That does not automatically make it wrong. But it does make it fragile.

I laid this out in detail in my earlier work on why a single global number props up the climate crisis story and why global mean temperature is physically meaningless as a diagnostic metric.

What makes the situation far more troubling is what has happened to the data over time.

A Persistent Pattern in the Adjustments

When people hear that temperature records are adjusted, they are usually told not to worry. Adjustments are described as small, technical corrections meant to improve accuracy. In isolation, that sounds reasonable. No measurement system is perfect, especially one that spans more than a century.

The problem is not that adjustments exist. The problem is the direction they overwhelmingly move.

When we examine official temperature datasets over time, a clear and consistent pattern emerges. Earlier temperatures tend to be revised downward, while more recent temperatures tend to be revised upward. Each change may appear minor, sometimes just a few tenths of a degree, but over decades, the cumulative effect is significant. The past becomes cooler and less variable, while the present becomes warmer and more extreme.

This is not speculation. It is visible directly in the data.

I explored this pattern in detail in my work examining how the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has treated past climate variability, particularly the Medieval Warm Period. The Medieval Warm Period was a well-documented interval of elevated temperatures roughly a thousand years ago, evident in historical records, proxy data, and regional reconstructions across much of the Northern Hemisphere.

Earlier assessments acknowledged this warmth. Later assessments progressively minimized it.

Through selective reconstruction choices, aggressive smoothing, and the privileging of certain proxy networks over others, the Medieval Warm Period was gradually flattened and reframed as minor or purely regional. The effect was to make modern warming appear more unique, more uniform, and more alarming than the broader historical context supports.

What makes this relevant today is that the same philosophical approach appears to be at work in modern temperature records. Variability in the past is treated as noise to be suppressed. Variability in the present is treated as a signal to be emphasized.

Natural warmth becomes something to explain away. Modern warmth becomes something to highlight.

This creates a powerful narrative bias. The climate record increasingly tells a story of a stable past suddenly disrupted by human influence, even when historical evidence shows periods of comparable or greater warmth long before industrial emissions.

And this is where the Netherlands enters the story.

A Warning Sign from the Netherlands

In the Netherlands, early twentieth-century heatwaves quietly vanished from the official temperature record following historical adjustments. Events that were once documented simply no longer counted.

After years of criticism and scrutiny, several of those heatwaves were quietly reinstated.

I will walk through exactly how and why that happened in the subscriber section below. For now, it is enough to recognize what this episode represents. It is not an isolated clerical error. It is a glimpse into how fragile and malleable our climate history has become.

Before we even get there, however, there is another question worth asking.

If we are willing to debate tenths of a degree in century-old data, why are we so confident in modern “record” temperatures measured next to jet exhaust, tarmac, and concrete? How many headline-making extremes are influenced not by climate, but by ideology?

That question alone should give us pause.

Just Before the Paywall

Taken individually, each of these issues can be dismissed. Together, they raise a far more unsettling possibility.

What if the global temperature record is not a neutral scientific archive, but a continuously curated narrative?
What if past warmth is being erased and present warmth amplified, not through fraud in the criminal sense, but through incentives, methodology, and institutional momentum?

In the subscriber section, I will show how this played out in detail in the Netherlands, why the reversal matters far beyond one country, and why the global average temperature may be one of the most misleading metrics ever elevated to policy-making authority.

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For decades, America has acted as if modern technology appears by magic… as if batteries, semiconductors, wind turbines, and defense systems simply materialize without raw materials. That illusion finally cracked with the announcement of Project Vault, a $12 billion effort to stockpile critical minerals inside the United States.

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As January comes to a close, I wanted to pause for a moment and say thank you.

This month, I published eight new articles here at Irrational Fear. That’s roughly the pace I’m aiming for going forward, about two pieces a week, enough to stay engaged with what’s happening, but not so much that the work becomes rushed or shallow.

With those January posts, th…

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Is climate change really making winters colder? As brutal polar vortex blasts freeze the U.S. in 2026, many media outlets scream “global warming exposed”: a warming planet is paradoxically causing freezing temps? Discover the jet stream waviness scam and why natural variability trumps the CO2 blame game.

As winter bites the Northern Hemisphere with swirling snowstorms and extreme cold snaps, many in the media and some prominent climate scientists point fingers: climate change is making the jet stream “wavier,” leading to polar vortex intrusions.

We’ve seen headlines about how a warming world causes freezing weather. The mental gymnastics to explain “it’s so hot it’s cold” are Olympic-level.

Whether the jet stream is super-straight (causing “localized chaos worldwide,” as one 2023 Weather Network article below put it) or extra-wavy (blamed for dumping Arctic air southward), it’s spun as evidence of anthropogenic global warming unraveling our weather patterns.

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But what is the polar vortex, and how does it link to the jet stream? The polar vortex is a vast low-pressure zone of cold air around Earth’s poles, strongest in winter. Think of it as a spinning top of frigid air in the stratosphere, contained by the polar jet stream—a fast-flowing air river in the troposphere acting as a barrier.

When the jet stream weakens or meanders more, polar vortex air can displace southward, bringing Arctic blasts to the U.S. Midwest or Europe. Many outlets claim rapid Arctic warming (Arctic amplification) weakens the pole-to-mid-latitude temperature gradient, making the jet stream erratic and boosting these events.

Recent coverage: Yale Climate Connections (Feb 2025) ties cold snaps in a warming world to a weakened, wavier jet letting Arctic air spill south. MIT’s explainer notes that faster Arctic warming might increase polar vortex disruptions, but scientists debate the link’s strength. BBC (Jan 2025) adds nuance, saying it’s “unknown” if climate change affects the vortex, with no model consensus, and cold extremes are less frequent overall due to warming.

Dartmouth’s news on a 2025 study shows the jet stream’s erratic behavior isn’t new. More on that soon.

This narrative fits the “climate crisis” playbook: every weather event, even normal ones, becomes proof of doom. Straight jet stream? Climate change locks in extremes. Wavy? It unleashes cold outbreaks.

Spin the wheel, and it always lands on “blame CO2.” But as I’ve argued before, the science doesn’t support this alarmism. In my 2024 piece, “The Jet Stream... Separating Scientific Reality from Climate Alarmism,” I highlighted how alarmists claim warming makes it “hyper-wavy,” leading to more extremes. But as a 2020 Science Advances study showed, there’s no statistically significant long-term trend in waviness over 40 years. Attributing specific events to climate-driven waviness is dubious; natural variability dominates. I called it propaganda from the “climate-industrial complex,” urging focus on real science over sensationalism.

The house of cards is crumbling further with a bombshell 2025 paper that shows modern jet stream waviness is nothing special… it’s well within natural historical variability, predating significant human influence. Using machine learning (self-organizing maps) on reanalysis data back to 1901, they reconstruct jet stream behavior far beyond the satellite era (post-1979). Their findings? The jet stream was often wavier in the mid-20th century than during the 1990-2010 “enhanced waviness” period blamed on Arctic amplification.

This directly challenges the idea that recent polar vortex events are a new fingerprint of climate change. Instead, it’s natural variability at play.

To get the full scoop on this game-changing research, including detailed breakdowns of its figures showing waviness trends over the 20th century, subscribe now. Paid members gain access to over 425 unique articles where I dismantle the climate crisis narrative with facts, not fear.

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For decades, the climate crisis narrative has rested on a single, emotionally powerful claim:

As the planet warms, extreme weather will become more frequent and more intense.

This idea didn’t emerge from nowhere. It has been repeated, often verbatim, by governments, international institutions, scientific bodies, and major media outlets. It became the mech…

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Bill McKibben recently published an essay titled “Pretend you’re running for Congress,” offering guidance on how candidates should talk about climate and energy heading into the 2026 midterm elections. His central claim is that elections will hinge on affordability, that energy prices will be decisive, and that candidates should keep the message simple: Republicans are driving demand, blocking clean energy, and raising prices… while renewable energy is cheap, abundant, and inevitable.

On the surface, this sounds pragmatic. But beneath the rhetoric is a familiar problem: the same slogans, the same moral framing, and the same absence of scientific or economic nuance that have defined climate politics for decades.

McKibben tells candidates to keep it simple because energy systems are “intricate and abstruse.” What he really means is that complexity gets in the way of the story. And the story must remain intact.

What’s missing from his essay is striking. There is almost no discussion of climate science itself… no mention of uncertainty, natural variability, or observational constraints. There is no acknowledgment that climate concern has already peaked politically. And there is no recognition that energy is not merely an input to the economy, but the foundation of human flourishing.

That omission matters because voters, especially younger ones, are no longer responding to fear the way they once did.

Climate alarm is fading, where people are already prosperous

There’s another uncomfortable reality missing from Bill McKibben’s argument: in wealthy countries, concern about climate change as a major national threat is declining, not rising.

Pew’s most recent global survey shows that since 2022, perceptions of climate change as a “major threat” have fallen across much of the developed world. Countries like Italy, the Netherlands, the UK, Germany, Sweden, Canada, France, and the United States all show noticeable drops. Even places that were once near consensus have cooled.

Meanwhile, concern is rising in several middle-income countries.

That pattern tells us something important.

In countries where basic needs are largely met — where electricity is reliable, food is abundant, air and water are clean, and infrastructure is resilient — climate alarm loses its emotional grip. People simply stop experiencing it as an existential threat competing with everyday realities.

By contrast, in countries still climbing the energy and development ladder, climate rhetoric is often absorbed alongside broader anxieties about instability, growth, and vulnerability… even when those anxieties are not actually driven by climate itself.

This is not evidence that rich countries are “denying science.”
It’s evidence that prosperity changes perception.

And it explains why McKibben’s fear-forward messaging increasingly resonates only within activist circles, not with the median voter in high-income democracies.

I saw the consequences firsthand

I didn’t need polling to understand where this was heading. I watched it unfold in my own classroom while teaching Earth science at the University of Alabama.

Students told me sincerely that they didn’t want to have children. Not because of finances or career uncertainty, but because they believed the planet would be largely uninhabitable within a decade or two. Some were convinced their children would suffer or die because of climate collapse.

That wasn’t activism.
It wasn’t empowerment.
It was despair.

And it didn’t come from understanding climate science more deeply. It came from being immersed in a steady stream of worst-case narratives, stripped of context and probability.

Alarmism produces anxiety, not stewardship

The landmark Nature survey of 10,000 young people found that nearly 60% were “very” or “extremely” worried about climate change. The dominant emotions were sadness, fear, anxiety, anger, and powerlessness. Optimism barely registered.

This is often cited by activists as proof that governments aren’t acting fast enough.

But it can just as easily be read as evidence that fear-based messaging has crossed from motivation into harm.

🔒 Below the paywall, I’ll show why climate alarmism collapses when confronted with data… and what politicians should actually say in 2026 if they want to be honest, scientifically grounded, and aligned with how people really behave.

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As we kick off 2026, the climate alarm machine is already in overdrive. A new paper published in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences claims that ocean heat content (OHC) reached another “record high” in 2025, with headlines screaming about “profound impacts” and “intensifying climate disasters.” Outlets like The Guardian warn of record ocean heat fueling disasters, while SciTechDaily declares Earth’s oceans just hit their hottest level ever recorded.

It’s the same old song: blame every warm blip on human CO2 emissions, ignore the data that doesn’t fit, and crank up the fear to eleven.

But is this really the smoking gun for climate catastrophe? Or is it another example of cherry-picked stats and selective narratives designed to push an agenda? In my past writings here on Irrational Fear, I’ve dissected how media and certain scientists hype ocean-related “crises” – from dead zones to hurricane “supercharging” – while conveniently overlooking inconvenient truths like natural variability, measurement limitations, and the oceans’ massive role in regulating CO2 levels.

If you’re a free reader, stick around for a quick overview of why this latest “record” might not be as alarming as it sounds. But for the full breakdown – including a deep dive into the new paper’s methodology, how it ties into my previous analyses on ocean heat sources and Henry’s Law, and why CO2 often follows temperature (not the other way around) – you’ll need to subscribe. Paid subscribers get the unfiltered truth, backed by data, to arm you against the irrational fear-mongering. Let’s tease it: this “record” OHC increase? It’s tiny in context, dwarfed by natural processes, and contradicted by real-world observations like declining hurricane energy. Ready to see through the hype? Hit that subscribe button.

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The Free Teaser: Why Ocean Heat “Records” Deserve Skepticism

Let’s start with the basics. The new paper, led by researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and international collaborators, estimates that global upper 2000m OHC increased by about 23 ZJ (zettajoules… that’s 10^21 joules) from 2024 to 2025. That’s a big number, but context matters. The Earth’s oceans hold an enormous amount of heat – we’re talking about a system that absorbs and releases energy on scales that make human influences look like a drop in the bucket (pun intended).

Media outlets are quick to link this to “intensifying disasters,” but the data tells a different story. Take hurricanes: despite rising sea surface temperatures (SSTs), accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) – a far more reliable metric than cherry-picked storm counts – has been declining since 1990.

In my 2024 piece, “Hurricane Hype Busted: Data Disproves Climate Supercharging Claims,” I showed how storms like Helene and Milton were weaponized for alarmism, even as global ACE trends downward. The IPCC itself admits high uncertainty in linking climate change to hurricane intensity (see #12 below), yet headlines ignore this for clicks.

Then there’s ocean “dead zones” and fish kills, often blamed on warming-driven oxygen loss. In my 2023 article, “Dead Zones, Eutrophication, Henry’s Law, and Climate Change,” I explained how these are primarily caused by agricultural runoff – not CO2. Claims that the oceans have taken up CO2 since 1960? It contradicts Henry’s Law basics: warming oceans release gases like O2 and CO2, but alarmists twist it to fit their narrative.

And don’t get me started on where ocean heat actually comes from. In “Where Does Ocean Heat Come From?”, I highlighted how crustal heat flow from hydrothermal vents adds ~40 terawatts annually – equivalent to 100,000 power plants – yet it’s barely mentioned in OHC discussions. With less than 0.0001% of the ocean accurately measured for temperature (thanks to sparse Argo floats), how confident can we be in these “records”?

Statistical methods are the real villain here. Alarmists love long-term trends that mask natural cycles, like the Atlantic Multidecadal Overturning Circulation (AMOC) or the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), which drives much of the recent warming. They use models tuned to amplify CO2’s role while downplaying solar, volcanic, and oceanic variability. The result? A narrative that every “record” proves impending doom, even as real-world impacts – fewer hurricane deaths, no surge in storm intensity – say otherwise.

This new paper fits the pattern: it acknowledges La Niña cooling SSTs in 2025 (down 0.12°C from 2024), yet hypes OHC as proof of unstoppable warming. But is it? Subscribers, let’s dive in…

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For decades, we were told that climate change itself was the looming threat… rising temperatures, extreme weather, catastrophe just over the horizon. But quietly, almost without public debate, the conversation has shifted. The danger is no longer climate change alone. The danger, increasingly, is what powerful institutions now propose to do about it.

What were once fringe, crackpot “solutions” whispered in obscure academic circles are breaking into the mainstream, published in reputable journals and pushed as serious policy ideas. These aren’t just bad ideas… they’re dangerous, hubristic experiments that could cause real harm, all in the name of fighting a crisis that’s more hype than reality.

I’ve been warning about this for years on Irrational Fear. In “Geoengineering Madness,” I exposed how companies like Make Sunsets are proposing to inject sulfur into the atmosphere to “cool” the planet, conveniently ignoring the trillions we’ve already spent scrubbing sulfur from fuels to combat acid rain. In “Exposing the Waste in Climate Solutions,” I detailed how $2 trillion has been flushed down the drain on unproven tech like carbon capture and blue hydrogen, while real environmental issues get ignored. And don’t get me started on Bovaer… the methane-busting additive for cows that sterilizes lab rats and comes with a laundry list of side effects, as I covered in “Follow The Money, And You’ll Find The Science”. The pattern is clear: climate change itself has never directly killed anyone or posed an existential threat, but the so-called “solutions” could unleash environmental, health, and economic disasters on a massive scale.

The irony? I’m labeled a “climate denier” for pointing out natural variability, the need for aggressive adaptation, and the fact that Earth’s climate has swung by orders of magnitude more than the 1-2°C “magic” threshold we’re supposedly chasing. Meanwhile, the real deniers are those with the god-like hubris to think we can “control” the planet’s climate… like we’re dialing a thermostat in a chaotic, complex system. As I discussed in “Complex Systems, Simple Solutions, and the Myth of Climate Fixes,” applying simplistic fixes to Earth’s intricate climate is a recipe for unintended catastrophe.

And speaking of the U.S., why are we even entertaining these mad-scientist schemes? As I’ve shown before in “Is the U.S. Getting Hot... or Not?,” there’s been no real increase in high temperatures here… the kind that fuel those scary “heat wave” headlines. What we’ve seen is a rise in overnight lows, bumping up averages, but fewer scorching days overall.

The climate industrial complex needs perpetual panic to survive, but the data tells a different story.

If you’re a paid subscriber, read on as we dive into two chilling new examples from mainstream publications: one proposing we weaponize a tick-borne disease to force people off meat, and another suggesting we pump sulfur into the skies using jumbo jets. These aren’t satire… they’re serious proposals, and they highlight why the solutions, not the climate, are what we should truly fear.

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