Climate Scientist Admits His Study Was Wrong
Every so often, someone inside the climate movement admits what the rest of us have long known: the apocalypse never came.
This week, Ted Nordhaus, founder of the Breakthrough Institute and once a leading voice in climate alarmism, wrote a remarkable essay titled “I Thought Climate Change Would End the World. I Was Wrong.” In it, he concedes that the catastrophe he once predicted was built on bad models, false assumptions, and ideological momentum.
“I no longer believe this hyperbole,” Nordhaus writes. “The amount of warming that is conceivable even in plausible worst-case scenarios is not remotely consistent with the sorts of catastrophic outcomes that I once believed in.”
For years, Nordhaus believed “business as usual” emissions would cause five degrees of warming by 2100. That prediction, he now admits, never made sense. The supposed “worst case” is now closer to three degrees, according to him, and even that, he says, is unlikely to spell disaster.
“Despite close to 1.5 degrees of warming over the last century,” he notes, “global mortality from climate and weather extremes has fallen by more than 96 percent on a per-capita basis.”
Nordhaus doesn’t just question the science; he questions the politics. He points out that the climate movement has a built-in incentive to exaggerate risk, because fear drives funding and influence.
“There are strong incentives to overestimate climate risk if you make a living doing left-of-center climate and energy policy,” he writes. “The movement has effectively conflated consensus science about the reality of climate change with catastrophist claims about climate risk.”
It’s rare to see someone from the inside tell the truth so clearly. Nordhaus reminds us that human progress, not panic, is what has always improved lives and protected the planet.
He deserves credit for saying it plainly: the world isn’t ending and never was.
October 20, 2025