Cal Thomas | May 21, 2026 | Townhall

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It’s so easy and comfortable being a liberal. You never have to admit you’re wrong when you’re demonstrably wrong. Nor do you have to be concerned with lack of support, because the liberal establishment — from the news media to your fellow Democrats, academia, “science” and Hollywood elites — is always with you (like The Force). None is about to admit error, so they simply move on to the next cause.

For half a century, we have been told that the end is near and if we don’t immediately allow government to impose significant changes on the way we live and use energy, we will burn to death. All the elites have made bold predictions that the end is coming in two years, five years, 10 years (choose your own number) if immediate action isn’t taken. Those dates arrived and the sky didn’t fall. History was not allowed to be a guide when it showed temperatures rising and falling in a cycle through periods of warming and cooling.

Now comes a report by the once highly credible (by liberals) International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and backed by the United Nations that consistently predicted the end is drawing closer unless we convert to other energy sources and significantly alter our lifestyles. The IPCC has now concluded, presumably after research untainted by political presuppositions, that the extreme scenarios they once were guilty of selling us are now “implausible”. The presumptions were wrong, it says, and so was the fearmongering, I say.

In the immortal words of the character Emily Litella (played by the late Gilda Radner on “SNL” ), “never mind.”

Never mind that global investment in climate action has surpassed $1 trillion annually, according to tracking by the Climate Policy Initiative. This has been a cult-like false god our overseers have demanded we worship. If we refused, we were to be ostracized to the land of the ignorant, the uneducated and those who don’t believe in “science.” Recall the days 50 years ago when “science” was convinced — and demanded we believe — that the Earth was cooling so much that if we (meaning government) didn’t do something, we would all freeze to death. In 1975, Newsweek did a feature article titled “The Cooling World.”

Carbon taxes were said to be one answer. Liberals celebrated rising gas prices — then and now — because they believed people would be forced to drive less, thus reducing carbon monoxide and lowering global temperatures. Electric cars were subsidized by the government. California passed the Advanced Clean Car II standards requiring all new vehicles sold in the state to be free of emissions starting in 2035.

Perhaps the most notorious of the IPCC predictions, as reported by the New York Post, was that “Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5, or ‘RCP 8.5’ — posited a hellish world of 12 billion people in the year 2100. The projection assumed the world would be burning more coal than exists, without such likely technological improvements as emissions-free nuclear plants.”

There are responsible ways to care for the environment — once called conservation — but “Chicken Little” scenarios rob science of its credibility. It might also rob politicians of their credibility if that had not been lost some time ago.

Again, it’s good to be a liberal. You feel at peace and are surrounded by people with similar views. The celebrities among them attend climate change meetings, flying in on their private jets and driving up in their large SUVs. They never admit they were wrong, much less apologize. Why should they? Don’t they know anyone who believes otherwise?

Readers may email Cal Thomas at tcaeditors@tribpub.com. Look for Cal Thomas’ latest book, “A Watchman in the Night: What I’ve Seen Over 50 Years Reporting on America” (HumanixBooks).

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The UN’s Climate Doomsday Scenario Just Fell Apart

Dmitri Bolt | May 21, 2026 3:30 PM | Townhall

The United Nations-backed climate panel over the weekend walked back one of its “worst-case scenario” greenhouse gas emissions scenarios, as a new report found that those projections “have become implausible.” The scenario predicted that humanity would double down on fossil fuels and take no action to mitigate climate change, and used it to make predictions about what the future may hold. 

Those scenarios included massive sea-level rise, global crop failures, and the rapid melting of polar ice. Democrats used the fearmongering to push Americans to pay billions of dollars to pursue mitigation efforts, while Europe practically castrated its own economy to do the same. And yet the scenario has been walked back, although climate scientists argue that it is due to current mitigation efforts already in place.

🚨 THE CLIMATE CHANGE SCAMMERS ARE PANICKING

Greg Gutfeld: “After decades of screaming the planet is six minutes from extinction, the UN just walked back their doomsday models, as fake as Ilhan Omar’s marriage!” 😂

No more funding the climate myth! pic.twitter.com/DyEOQxXBCd

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) May 21, 2026

“GOOD RIDDANCE! After 15 years of Dumocrats promising that ‘Climate Change’ is going to destroy the Planet, the United Nations TOP Climate Committee just admitted that its own projections (RCP8.5) were WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!” the president wrote in a post 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. Unlike the Dumocrats, who use Climate Alarmism nonsense to push their GREEN NEW SCAM, my Administration will always be based on TRUTH, SCIENCE, and FACT! President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

This comes as many conservatives have argued that even if climate change predictions are taken at face value, they would prefer to rely on human ingenuity to mitigate possible damage rather than, for example, taking Europe’s path, becoming reliant on fossil fuels from foreign adversaries, and weakening their economy over a problem that is unlikely to affect people for decades. 

Rather than pushing through policies that force people to stop using fossil fuels or impose stricter emissions standards—often resulting in higher taxes and greater government control, figures like Ben Shapiro have argued it is best to rely on the free market and technological innovation. The idea is to keep Western economies plowing forward, driving advancements that either make alternatives to fossil fuels more efficient or reduce how much fossil fuel it takes to power our machines.

“One of the great ways that you adapt is through capitalism, because one of the reasons that you are going to have a better world by 2100 than you have today, despite climate change, is that the economy is going to continue to grow by virtually every estimate,” Shapiro said during a speech in 2021. 

Lauren Cass of the Manhattan Institute points out, regarding Nordhaus’ model, by 2100, regardless of climate change, the world, the entire world, is more than six times wealthier than in 2015, because we keep getting better at doing stuff. Human beings get better at doing stuff. So should we build more seawalls? Absolutely. Should we take mitigating measures? Of course. And does that involve infrastructure building? Sure. But if we are talking about completely destroying the entire carbon-based economy in favor of unproven technologies that do not compete on a per capita level, people don’t know what they’re talking about.

Now, with the alarmism out of the way, the West might be able to get back to what it does best: improving its technology and growing its economies in a way that could make this issue something entirely moot in just a short amount of time.