By James Corbett on July 19, 2026 – corbettreport.com
For those who have been paying attention, the stunning collapse of the climate scam over the past year has been something to behold.
First there was the COP Flop.
Then the US withdrew from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Then Judith Curry retired her blog, opining that “It’s time to declare victory against climate stupidity and move on.”
Then The Guardian published an article lamenting that less than 5% of UK media outlets have used the recent European heat wave as an excuse to promote Net Zero propaganda.
And now even The New York Times is waving the white flag on the climate Armageddon story…well, kind of.
So, what on earth is happening? How did we go from a world where the climate apocalypse was touted as an existential threat to life on earth and trumpeted on the news every single day to a world where climate change isn’t even on the radar anymore?
Let’s find out.
This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Un-Settled Science: The death of RCP 8.5
Students of the climate scam will know by now the laundry list of scientific frauds, fallacies and fudgery that have undergirded the supposedly “settled science” of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming.
You’ll know, for example, that the temperature record has been systematically tampered with to consistently cool the past and warm the present, thus creating a false impression of rapidly increasing temperatures.
And you’ll know the various techniques of statistical chicanery that are employed to keep a credulous public believing in a false narrative about imminent climate catastrophe.
And you’ll know that climategate gave a very revealing look at how climate scientists actually operate and demonstrated the extent to which they are willing to lie, cheat and smear to keep contradictory evidence out of the scientific record—despite the climategate debunkers‘ efforts to whitewash that scandal.
And you’ll know that the “global average temperature“ is not an actual, measured temperature but a calculated number constructed from various data sets of dubious quality.
But what you might not know unless you’ve been keeping close track of the latest developments in climate crockery is that the IPCC has officially dropped RCP 8.5.
For those who are well-versed in these matters, no more needs to be said. Most people, though, will have no clue what any of this means. Allow me to explain.
The IPCC, of course, is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN body tasked with “provid[ing] governments at all levels with scientific information that they can use to develop climate policies.” It issues an “assessment report” compiling key findings in the published climate science literature every six or seven years. These assessment reports are taken very seriously by the establishment media, of course, and are used by politicians to justify all manner of draconian Net Zero policies and Green New Deal tyranny.
Listeners of The Corbett Report will know that the IPCC is a scam, that its assessment reports are hot air and that the entire IPCC process has been rigged from the start.
You’ll know, for example, that its “Summary for Policy Makers”—an explicitly political document designed to justify various climate policies—is a negotiated document, not a scientific assessment. In fact, the scientific report is rewritten after the Summary for Policy Makers has been negotiated to make sure the science is consistent with what the diplomats have decided.
One of the linchpins of the IPCC’s climate doom-mongering is its Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP) scenarios—a series of models projecting how greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere might rise over the next century. These “pathways” envision different scenarios depending on the extent to which countries curtail their greenhouse gas emissions and take measures to adopt renewables and so-called “green” energy. They range from RCP 1.9—the pathway that “focuses on limiting warming to below 1.5C, the aspirational goal of the Paris Agreement”—to RCP 8.5—a pathway projecting a “near-monotonic increase of emissions until 2100.” RCP 8.5 is often used as a “worst-case scenario” and is meant to represent what will happen if humanity continues with “business as usual”—i.e., what will happen if we do not begin sacrificing the whole of civilization to the angry weather gods.
These projected numbers, in turn, are used to project future global surface temperatures.
In other words, RCP 8.5 is the model that the scaremongers bust out whenever they want to portray a future temperature map in fiery red.
Of course, the process by which these models are turned into temperature projections is itself a sleight of hand. It relies on a number called “Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity“ (ECS) that estimates the long-term warming response to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentrations. But even the IPCC admits that ECS is completely arbitrary: “No best estimate for equilibrium climate sensitivity can now be given because of a lack of agreement on values across assessed lines of evidence and studies.” So: garbage in (ECS), garbage out (temperature predictions).
But never mind how these models are turned into future temperature estimates. Even the models themselves are highly dubious!
The “worst-case scenario” RCP 8.5 model has been debated for years, with critics pointing out that this pie-in-the-sky fantasy scenario involves completely implausible assumptions. It even predicts that humans will burn five times more coal than is known to exist on the entire planet over the course of the next century.
Well, now the critics of this RCP 8.5 scare scenario have been vindicated!
In April, Geoscientific Model Development published “The Scenario Model Intercomparison Project for CMIP7 (ScenarioMIP-CMIP7),” a model experiment paper informing the development of something called the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP). This collaborative project has been developing climate model comparisons for over three decades and its work forms the basis for the IPCC’s climate projections. This new paper talks about the work being done on CMIP7, the latest phase of this ongoing project, and, crucially, it has ruled that RCP 8.5 has “become implausible” due to changes in climate policy and recent emission trends.
Now, there’s a much more detailed analysis of this paper and its implications to be made (and CERES-Science provides that analysis here), but, long story short: RCP 8.5—the model which has been cited by thousands of climate papers as the most realistic projection of what will happen to the earth’s climate if we don’t swallow the Net Zero crazy pill—will not be included in the next IPCC assessment report.
It’s hard to overstate the significance of this development. The IPCC and their fear-mongering fellow travellers will no longer be able to use their “business-as-usual” model to “project” utterly implausible climate apocalypse scenarios and bamboozle the public into accepting increasingly draconian civilization-stunting measures in the name of averting a completely imaginary disaster.
Naturally, the propagandists of the climate cult have stepped in to do some damage control on this issue.
The New York Times, for instance, wants you to know that “global warming is still a threat,” while acknowledging that “the decision to back away from a worst-case outlook raises questions about whether some risks have been overstated.”
And over at Vox, Bryan Walsh almost achieves a moment of self-consciousness when he admits, “I didn’t always know — and didn’t always communicate — that the scenario behind the most apocalyptic, attention-getting findings was largely an attempt to imagine how bad things could get, not a true forecast.” His complete ignorance over his own subject matter domain aside, however, Walsh is careful to assure his readers that “even if we’ve averted doom, there is a lot of work to do to secure a safer future.” (Source: Trust me, bro!)
But here’s the real point—the point that Walsh almost realized in his moment of epiphany: this was never about the science. Not even the climate journalists whose entire job was to try to explain this science to the public actually knew the underlying science they were writing about. And if you interviewed a thousand climate activists, you’d be lucky to find even one that could tell you what ECS is or what RCP 8.5 represents.
No, this isn’t about science. It’s about narrative.
And the most remarkable change is happening on the narrative front.
The Zeitgeist Tipping Point
The age of over-the-top climate scare-mongering began in earnest on Earth Day 1990, the 20th anniversary of the 1970 UN-sponsored “Earth Day” event. Originally proposed in 1969 as a “a day to honour the Earth and the concept of peace,” by 1990 Earth Day had become an excuse for Hollywood stars like Robin Williams, Christopher Lloyd, Bill Cosby, Candace Bergen and Kermit the Frog to host hour-long made-for-TV propaganda specials lecturing the neofeudal serfs about how heating their homes and driving to work was polluting the earth and angering the weather gods.
This propaganda drive was part of the preparation for Maurice Strong’s 1992 Earth Summit, which, as Corbett Reporteers know, birthed the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the entire UN-led climate agenda. The UNFCCC became a self-licking ice cream cone for the climate cultists, providing a venue for them to come together, fret about the IPCC’s latest pronouncements of doom, and issue ever-greater warnings of total planetary extinction unless politicians hand over all power to the UN and adopt the Net Zero (or is that Absolute Zero?) agenda.
In other words, everyone under 50 years old has spent their entire conscious life in the shadow of this propaganda campaign. So long have they heard these jeremiads about doom and destruction that it’s difficult for them to imagine not seeing some pampered Hollywood celebrity or out-of-touch career politician scolding them for using air conditioning or browbeating them for taking a commercial flight to go on a family vacation.
But in case you haven’t noticed, the public has gradually started tuning out the constant hectoring of the “climate emergency” Chicken Littles. Instead, they have finally begun questioning the supposedly “settled science” telling them that pets and babies are bad for the planet.
One early indication of the rejection of the climate hysteria came in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, when the end of Germany’s twenty-year plan to phase out nuclear power coincided with a severe disruption in LNG supplies from Russia to create an energy crisis. People across Europe and around the world looked at Germany’s predicament and saw the real consequences of feel-good “green energy” policies: energy poverty.
From that point on, the would-be champions of Net Zero have had an uphill battle against an increasingly skeptical public. Last year we saw the stunning collapse of the Net-Zero Banking Alliance in the face of massive public backlash, BlackRock’s strategic retreat from ESG investing, and the beginning of the implosion of the UNFCCC and the IPCC.
And now, as I mentioned in the introduction of today’s editorial, even the staunchest defenders of the climate scam in the establishment media—The New York Times and The Guardian—are fretting about the end of their climate hysteria grift.
In “Democrats Once Vowed to Stop Oil and Gas. Now They’re Not So Sure,” the establishment mouthpieces at The NYT report that even mainstream Democratic politicians in the US are now shying away from Clinton/Obama/Biden-era policies to stop new drilling and pipeline projects for the oil and gas industry.
Across the Northeast, Democratic governors have started to consider gas pipeline expansions, once unthinkable in the most climate-conscious states in the country. Even climate hawks in Congress have shifted their tactics, lawmakers said in recent interviews. And though the co-sponsors of the Green New Deal in 2019, Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez of New York, still rail against the fossil fuel industry, they rarely emphasize their once-influential plan to mobilize the U.S. economy to fight climate change.
And in “Most UK media reports on June heatwave failed to mention climate crisis,” the increasingly delusional presstitutes of The Guardian lament that their own efforts to change the narrative discourse around the “climate emergency” have come to nought. Despite quoting their own spokesperson touting The Guardian‘s “groundbreaking” journalistic efforts—including “updating our style guide to adopt terms like ‘climate emergency’ and ‘global heating’”—they lament that “Most of the UK media stories about the record-breaking heatwave that struck in June failed to mention the climate crisis.”
Perhaps the madness of the era of Global Warming Frenzy came into sharpest focus during the recent European heat wave when French politicians tried to blame US air conditioning for rising temperatures…before France’s own citizens began installing air conditioning in record numbers in an attempt to beat the heat.
People are fed up with being told by rich politicians that they must live in pre-industrial squalor to appease the angry weather gods. Even if he knows absolutely nothing about RCP 8.5 or the phoney science the climate scam was built on, the average Joe Blow is smart enough to know that “settled science” is not science at all and that the “experts” who confidently announce that cars, pets and air conditioners are causing the heat death of the planet are the same type of “experts” who told us that the human race would be decimated if we didn’t mask up, stand six feet apart and roll up our sleeves for an experimental genetic intervention.
So, given that the climate witch doctors’ spell over the public has finally been broken, is it time to go the way of Judith Curry? Should we all shutter up our climate blogs, declare victory and move on? Or is there a deeper lesson to be learned from this remarkable cultural shift that’s happening around us?
Our Opinions Matter
First of all, for the benefit of those who would love to “Well, ackshually…“ me and tell me how naive I am to believe that the climate scam is really over: please don’t patronize me. I’ve been running The Corbett Report for nearly twenty years now and I know exactly how psyops work.
Of course Mark Carney and his fellow conspirators are going to use any and every opportunity—like the ongoing Canadian wildfires—to try to scare the public into believing in the Apocalypse once again and into accepting ever-more-restrictive climate targets in the name of appeasing the fire god.
Of course the UN is going to attempt to claim the legal authority to begin prosecuting states that aren’t meeting their climate targets.
Of course certain elements of the oligarch class (Bill Gates, for example) are dropping the climate hysteria not out of a sudden epiphany about the error of their ways but because they’re hungry to feed more power to their AI data centre beasts.
And of course the Green New Dealers are just going to go back to the drawing board and reframe their plan to stop industrial civilization in terms of the latest political narrative—i.e., the AI data centre problem.
No, of course the climate agenda isn’t over yet.
But it would be equally naive to think that this tidal change in public opinion is of no consequence whatsoever. The powers-that-shouldn’t-be didn’t spend billions of dollars and countless man-hours of work diligently propagandizing the public about ManBearPig because their opinion doesn’t matter. They didn’t build up the entire multinational, multibillion-dollar climate change-dependent green economy and its associated academic institutions, media outlets and NGO groups because they were planning on just dropping the whole climate narrative in 2026.
No, they built it up because they need public buy-in for these neofeudal, eat-ze-bugs, own-nothing-and-be-happy policies to have a chance of succeeding. People will not just sit quietly and die in their increasingly energy-deprived hovels unless they have been fed a narrative as to why dying for the planet is not only morally virtuous but necessary for life itself.
And, as the people of France are proving, once the general public no longer believe in that narrative, they’ll just get off their virtue-signalling high horses and start installing air conditioners to live their lives with a modicum of comfort, politicians be damned.
So, no, of course the climate scam is not dead and buried. But it has been dealt a significant blow in recent years. And, given that I have been working hard to educate the public about this scam for nearly two decades now, you’ll forgive me for taking a moment to note this positive development and encourage its expansion.
Now we need to apply the same effort we spent exposing the climate scam to exposing all the other false narratives that are being used to manipulate the public.
Humanity is waking up to the scams that are keeping them enslaved. Let’s help it!
