Climate Realists on Offense, Radical Critics in Retreat
UN jettisons worst case climate predictions as Team Trump pushes American power.
Vindication. That's what climate realists within the scientific community have found. Honest scientists have explored the natural influences driving recent warming trends, while highlighting the benefits of carbon dioxide, and exposing the faulty assumptions behind modeling exercises. Now, after years of spurious attacks, their work has paid off.
How vindicated? The sitting head of the EPA told a ballroom filled with these concerned scientists and activists their work led to the biggest deregulation effort in American history—while the progressive left lost its mind.
Realistic Climate Expectations Take the Stage
Media reaction to the Heartland Institute's 16th annual International Conference on Climate Change in Washington D.C. demonstrates the level of vindication for climate realists. So does a bombshell revelation from the United Nations. The scientists and energy policy analysts from across the country and around the globe who took part in the gathering discussed their latest research into climate trends. They also commented on a wide range of economic and regulatory topics.
EPA Chief Lee Zeldin's opening keynote address to the conference precipitated a media meltdown that has continued over the past few weeks. In his remarks, Zeldin placed a strong emphasis on the Trump administration's efforts to repeal the Obama-era endangerment finding that declared CO2 a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. As Zeldin explained, the endangerment finding has been used to justify expensive and burdensome climate regulations since it was enacted in 2009.
If the administration is successful in its effort to repeal the finding, it will result in the largest deregulatory action in U.S. history, according to an EPA press release. The agency estimates the repeal would save U.S. taxpayers more than $1.3 trillion. Legal challenges in support and opposed to the repeal are already working their way through the court system.
The CO2 Coalition, a nonprofit group that co-sponsored the Heartland conference, has intervened on behalf of the administration's deregulatory initiative. In its filing, the coalition challenges the scientific underpinnings of the endangerment finding and makes the case that empirical data along with peer-reviewed studies and research contradict the finding.
Media Meltdown
Media outlets including the Washington Post, the New York Times, and The Guardian, a British daily paper, took a jaundiced view of the conference and its presentations. The Post appeared panicked over the idea that climate realists have gained traction with President Donald Trump in office. "EPA Chief Praises Group for Opposing Government Action on Climate Change," the Post bemoaned in a headline. The paper also provided the Environmental Defense Fund, a group that benefits financially from climate litigation, with a platform to criticize Heartland.
The New York Times was every bit as unhinged in its article titled: "Climate Change Denial Sees a Resurgence in Trump's Washington." The paper repeated the canard of a supposed consensus among scientists on the causes of climate change. The Old Gray Lady failed to report several of the Heartland panel discussions that the existence of a vigorous debate over the role of natural and human influences. The Center for Environmental Research and Earth Sciences (CERES), for instance, has released a study that strongly suggests the sun as the culprit. The amount of solar energy reaching the Earth's atmosphere is primarily responsible for the observed global warming that has occurred since the 1800s. CERES scientists and researchers commented on some of the key takeaways from their study during the conference.
The idea that climate change is naturally induced rather than human caused is not what outlets like The Guardian want to hear. In its coverage, the British paper insists there is a "consensus" on climate and that "global warming is real and urgent" and primarily caused by human emissions.
But the narrative from media organs hostile to Heartland has encountered a big problem since the time of the April conference. The U.N. now acknowledges that its alarmist future climate models do not square with reality. Known as RCP (Representative Concentration Pathway) 8.5, this worst-case climate change scenario has officially been jettisoned. In May, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published its next generation of possible future climate change scenarios where it eliminated RCP 8.5.
"The United Nations TOP Climate Committee just admitted that its own projections (RCP8.5) were WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!," President Trump crowed on Truth Social. "For far too long Climate Activism has been used by Dumocrats to scare Americans, push horrible Energy Polices, and fund BILLIONS into their bogus research programs."
Heartland's antagonists in the media are now searching for ways to backpedal, spin, or the case of The Guardian, ignore the U.N.'s reversal.
Sterling Burnett, an editor and researcher with Heartland, dismissed the press coverage of the institute's conference. He also sees signs and indications that climate alarmists are in retreat.
"I'm less concerned with what the media is saying about us and more focused on the fact that media coverage of climate is way down," he told Restoration News in an interview. "It's the climate alarmists in and outside the media who are the fringe."
Burnett estimates that at one point the Washington Post had 16 reporters covering climate issues but, but that number has dwindled to five.
"They've laid off two-thirds of their climate reporters," he said.
The scientific data that has accumulated since Heartland first began holding its international climate conferences 16 years ago, Burnett argues, has made the alarmist position more untenable.
"We've had 16 more years of data and evidence," he said. "The science was always with us, but what's really going to convince people is long term data, and more evidence and that's what we have now, and that's what has put climate realists on solid footing."
Gregg Goodnight, an independent retired engineer who attended the conference, called out media outlets for pursuing what he calls a "self-serving narrative." He said the preferred narrative is detached from even handed coverage.
"The climate agenda was always a cover for another real, but hidden agenda and a scam," Goodnight said. "This was always about population control and globalism. But the reality of high energy prices is biting, and the public is growing tired of the climate agenda."
There's also what Rob Bradley, the founder and CEO of the Institute for Energy Research (IER), calls "the Trump effect." The politics of climate change, he told Restoration News, have shifted dramatically, especially during Trump's second term.
"There's deregulation, and a dynamic not seen before," Bradley said. "The U.S. Gross Domestic Product is setting a global example and business leaders are finally seeing that it's okay to be economically correct, and not politically correct."
Reflecting on what the Heartland Institute has achieved since it climate conferences began 16 years ago, Joseph Bast, a former executive director and president for the organization, detects a "certain spirit of optimism" that was not present going back to 2008. "There's a willingness to cooperate that maybe we didn't have back then," Bast said. "What we are seeing now is more of reunion and I would even say a day of celebration."
James Taylor, the current Heartland president, shares these convictions and sees momentum continuing to shift in favor of climate realism.
"We are getting a scientific perspective out there that was not out there before," he said. "We are talking to scientists with real atmospheric experience and people are discerning the truth. We've seen quite a change in these past few years. It was not so long ago [President] Obama had taxpayer money funding climate alarmism."
Climate Activists Maintain Financial Advantage
Despite the progress that has been made in debunking climate alarmism, Craig Rucker, president of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), strikes a cautionary tone. While scientists and researchers who have expressed skepticism toward alarmist theories are finding greater opportunities to express themselves, Rucker warns that the opposing side maintains a significant financial advantage.
After researching the top 10 environmental activist groups operating in the U.S. and comparing them against the top 10 free market groups on Grok, Rucker found that on an annual basis the green groups had about $4 billion at their disposal to pursue their climate agenda versus only about $200 million for groups pursuing free market environmental policies. Rucker told Restoration News:
Climate realists are winning the policy debate, and the science is on our side. Lee Zeldin summarized very well where we are with climate realists having been vindicated. The administration is taking seriously what we are saying and implementing many of our reforms. The failure of catastrophic predictions to materialize over time has worked to our advantage. But the climate activist movement still has lots of money and organization here in the U.S. and overseas. They are just waiting for Trump to go out of office.
Heartland operates a "ClimateRealism" website that critiques media coverage of climate issues while also calling attention to fresh scientific developments. One of its latest posts comments on the ramifications of the U.N. dropping its RCP 8.5 projections.
Meanwhile, the free-market institute is already planning ahead for another climate conference next year to be held outside of Washington D.C.
One thing we can accurately model for the future: the mainstream media coverage will certainly remain just as unhinged as always.
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