I am what the Left calls a climate “denier,” meaning that I refuse to believe with all my heart that a slight warming trend signals pending Armageddon. There are lots of reasons for holding this viewpoint, and if you have a few hours to kill I’d be happy to give you the Cliff Notes version.
I am also a science nerd. And because of this the YouTube algorithm regularly serves up a diet of science-themed videos. There are thousands of them, ranging in quality from “meh” to “will change your life.”
Evidently, the algorithm does not approve of my skeptical stance, as it regularly recommends content clearly intended to induce panic. A series called PBS Terra exemplifies this phenomenon. Terra is basically grade-school science dressed up with sonorous narration, eye-catching graphics, and whoosh-bang sound effects. Though it covers a range of topics, Terra’s staple is climate change. It pushes, hard, the usual activist talking points, which makes it a huge hit with a certain demographic. The comments section of each episode brim with thousands of fawning tributes.
A recent episode was typical. It explored the idea that large swaths of our planet might soon become uninhabitable because a few places on it are currently experiencing exceptional humidity coupled with heat. The title screams danger: Too Hot and Humid to Live!
Certainly, there are places on the planet that are very uncomfortable and occasionally hazardous because of high heat plus humidity. The best examples of this are found around the Persian Gulf, a shallow sea surrounded, but for a single narrow outlet, by scorching-hot desert. In this area, on the hottest days of the year, the intense heat plus humidity (due to rapid evaporation of Persian Gulf waters) combine to produce a perceived temperature, or “heat index,” approaching 150 degrees Fahrenheit. This is not a new thing. It’s been this way since humans have been keeping records. But lately it has gotten just a tad worse, supposedly. So naturally it follows that the planet is doomed.
I read the first several hundred comments, and couldn’t help but notice a recurrent theme. It went something like this: “I’ve lived in [such and such] all my life and the weather used to be perfect, but now it’s just hot, all the time. I can’t stand it.” It reminds me of the joke about old folks recalling their childhoods, when they had to hike some outrageous distance to school every day, uphill both ways, through chest-deep snow.
I have lived all but a couple years of my life, sixty seven and counting, in Texas. In that time I have lived through three distinct climate patterns. When I was a child in the 1960s, the winters were significantly harsher, with most having at least some snow. Summers were always hot, but bearable. That changed about 1980, when there came a distinct warming trend. Winters quite suddenly became much milder, and snow basically vanished. We had numerous winters without even a single freeze, and ornamental banana trees suddenly bore fruit for the first time. Summers began to have more very hot days, and the heat often lasted into October. This culminated in the summer of 2011, which broke almost every heat record there was.
This pattern persisted until about 2014, when winters took a definite downward turn. Quite suddenly we began to have more sharp cold spells, and snow began to fall again on occasion. Summers were still hot, with frequent days over 100, but every other year or so they would be broken by heavy rain in August or early September. This pattern has continued and intensified. The last seven winters have all been on the harsh side, with snow, often more than once, in almost all. The winter of 2021 featured the worst cold outbreak in probably 60 or 70 years, with 10 days of continuous sub-freezing temperatures and 8 inches of snow, which did not melt for a week. Extreme summer heat is becoming less common, and the heat usually breaks for good sometime in September. The summer of 2025 has so far been the mildest in decades. Again, three distinct climate patterns.
My parents and grandparents also experienced obvious climate change in their time. My grandparents’ early life in the 1920s and 30s were marked by extreme heat and drought events, culminating in the Dust Bowl of 1933-36, which were the hottest years ever recorded in the United States by a pretty good margin. My mother, who was a small child at the time, recalled it vividly. Everyone who lived through this harsh period remembered it for the rest of their lives. This pattern broke around 1940, when there began a steady cooling trend. By the mid 1970s, it had cooled enough that scientists worried openly that a new Ice Age might be upon us. This trend bottomed out and began to reverse in the late 1970s, which I was able to experience. And within just a few years, alarm about global cooling morphed into alarm about global warming.
Interestingly, there has been an obvious and concerted effort among climate activists to rewrite history by downplaying the ice-age panic of the mid-1970s. Some, incredibly, even assert that it didn’t actually happen. Which is news to those of us who lived through it and remember it well.
I also notice a lot of wallowing in climate gloom. Weirdly, people seem to enjoy contemplating apocalypse. I am reminded of the way people compulsively poke at a sore tooth. Even though it hurts like bloody hell every time, we seem unable to stop doing it.
There is something in human nature that compels us to obsess over the negative. We ignore all positive indicators, yet fixate on that one outlier detail that seems to portend disaster. This existential paranoia is, I believe, the driving force behind climate-change panic. We are wired by hundreds of millions of years of evolution to be hyper-alert. Is that rustling in the brush a hedgehog or a tiger? Well 99.8 percent of the time it IS just a hedgehog, but if you guess wrong, you’ll likely die. So best to treat every warning sign as a deadly threat, because wary critters survive, while complacent ones get eaten. By this logic, every out-of-the-ordinary weather event becomes a harbinger of impending global catastrophe, which has been perpetually 20 years away for the last 50 years.
A little perspective is in order. Consider the following observations.
(1) Carbon dioxide (CO2,) which has been blamed for the recent warming, is a trace gas, and is so scarce in the atmosphere that it is measured in parts per million (PPM.) Over the last 12,000 years its average concentration in the atmosphere has been around 280 PPM. But over the last century that value has risen, and currently stands a bit above 400 PPM, or one twenty-fith of one percent. By contrast, nitrogen, the most common atmospheric gas, is about 2000 times as abundant, comprising 78 percent of the atmosphere. Oxygen comprises about 21 percent.
CO2 is not poison. Quite the opposite; it is the foundation of life on this planet, because it is a fundamental component of photosynthesis. Plants require it to grow tissue. Without a sufficient supply of CO2 in the atmosphere, all plant life dies, with all animal life following soon after. The critical value is about 150 parts per million (PPM.) Below that value, photosynthesis becomes impossible, and all surface plant life dies. At least twice during the last glacial outbreak, which ended only about 12,000 years ago, the atmospheric concentration of CO2 flirted with that critical value. Fortunately the CO2 level rebounded somewhat. At the current value of 420 PPM, we have a little breathing room, pun intended.
(2) From a biological standpoint, this planet does not have too much CO2; it has too little. The current atmospheric concentration of CO2 is lower than 99 percent of Earth history. It is also about one fourth the Phanerozoic average. (The Phanerozoic is the latest of the Earth’s four Eons, and is defined by the existence of complex life.) At the dawn of that Eon, 540 million years ago, when multicellular life suddenly exploded into being, the level of CO2 in the atmosphere was about 4000 PPM. Until just a few million years ago, the level rarely dropped below 1000 PPM. Most plant genera evolved when CO2 levels were much higher; today’s comparatively low values are a strain. A cornfield on a sunny summer day will use up every bit of available CO2 in the air near the ground. The higher levels of the last forty years have triggered an enormous burst of plant growth in every life zone on the planet. Amazingly, this very good news is almost completely ignored by the media. But why? I have my suspicions.
(3) CO2 is a minor greenhouse gas with limited effect. It absorbs (and re-emits) radiant energy strongly in only one narrow relevant band, centered on the 15 micrometer wavelength. CO2 does this so effectively that it absorbs almost all the energy that can be in that wavelength, even at low concentrations. At 200 PPM, 80 plus percent of the available energy is absorbed. At 300 PPM, 90ish percent of the available energy is absorbed. At 400 PPM, just a couple of percentage points more energy is absorbed. And so forth. It is a classic case of diminishing returns.
Beyond a certain point, adding additional CO2 to the atmosphere has little effect, because all the energy that can be retained already is. We have likely reached that point. Furthermore, the energies involved are small to the point of negligible. By the IPCC’s own estimates, the recent uptick in CO2 has increased the amount of radiant energy reaching the surface by only about 0.7 percent, a trivial change that could not possibly exert more than a minor effect.
Water vapor, by contrast, effectively absorbs many wavelengths across the outgoing long wave (OLR) spectrum, and is much more abundant throughout the lower atmosphere than is CO2. It is by far the more important greenhouse gas, and responsible for up to 95 percent of overall GHE. In the tropics and mid-latitudes, CO2 is completely overshadowed by water vapor. The only place where CO2 outperforms water vapor as a GHG is the polar regions, in the winter, when the amount of WV in the air is very low. Here the principal effect of elevated CO2 levels has been to cause somewhat higher nighttime winter low temperatures.
(4) Our planet is not too warm; it is too cold. Global temperatures have been steadily dropping for the last 50 million years*. About 2.5 million years ago this trend accelerated to the point that our planet entered a full-on ice age, the most intense in at least 250 million years, which continues to this moment. Indications are that the worst is yet to come. In all likelihood, millions of years of glacial conditions lie ahead.
By chance we happen to be alive during a rare “interglacial” period of relatively mild and stable temperatures. These periods of remission come along every 120,000 years or so and last, on average, around 10,000 years. This one, called the Holocene (“wholly recent,”) has been going for about 12,000, as of this writing. It’s “Optimum” or peak, was about 6000 years ago, and temperatures have been declining since, with occasional minor reversals, such as our current warm spell.
Statistically speaking, the end of the Holocene is near. Climatologically speaking, we are in the “neoglacial” phase of it. That’s the part right before the ice comes back. For the next 120,000 years. Which could happen any day now, geologically speaking.
However you shake it, at this moment in history the chance of thermal Apocalypse due to a minor CO2 spike is so low it rounds to zero.
(5) By objective metrics, there is no climate “crisis,” an overused word if ever there was one. You’d think our planet was boiling, burning, and drowning all at once, what with the glut of climate porn in legacy and social media, all day, every day. Yet in reality it’s pretty much as it ever was. Hurricanes are not becoming more frequent or violent, nor are tornadoes, droughts, or floods. What has increased is media coverage, breathless, emotive saturation coverage of every disaster, with the sole intention of grabbing eyeballs in a very noisy, intensely competitive media space.
In reality, at this moment in history our climate is almost freakishly benign, considering that we are in the middle of an ice age. And because of this fortunate happenstance, humans are flourishing as never before. Deaths due to climate disasters have been falling steadily since the early 20th century. In the first half of 2025, fewer people died of climate-related disasters than any comparable period in any year in recorded history. This excellent news goes completely unreported by the popular media. Why? Again, I have my suspicions.
(6) Climate change is the norm. Every moment, every point on the planet is either trending wetter or drier, warmer or colder, by some amount, either a lot or a little. This thing we call “the climate” is a staggeringly complex and chaotic system consisting of billions of interlinked, highly dynamic components. Even after decades of study we understand it in only the most general sense. Continuous change is the nature of such a system. A favorite trope of climate activists is that the Earth’s climate was once stable and benign. Until, that is, humans came along and screwed it up. This is good-old-days mythology, and total horseshit. In just the last few million years there have been hundreds of dramatic swings between temperate and frigid conditions.
(7) There is no such thing as an “unprecedented” weather or climate event. It has all happened before, many times. Many commenters to the PBS Terra video mentioned the “heat dome” that affected the Pacific Northwest in the summer of 2021, stressing how such a thing had “never” happened before. When in fact there have been something like twenty of these events in just the last 125 years. The one in 1898, when CO2 levels were low, was just as hot (and lasted almost twice as long) as the one in 2021. The worst hot spells in US history, by far, occurred in the mid 1930s. But those who push climate panic rarely mention this because it also happened when C02 levels were low, so it blows the narrative.
(8) People are drawing sweeping conclusions based on limited observations. We have pretty good climate records for only the last 50 years or so for maybe 40 percent of the planet, so-so records for the 50 years before that, pretty sketchy records for the 50 years before that, and poor to nonexistent records for the entirety of history before that. For all but the most recent period of history, we must rely on anecdotal records, when available, and “proxies,” i.e. natural processes that track climate conditions somewhat. But proxies tend to be low-resolution approximations that mute or miss altogether any short-term fluctuations, no matter how extreme. But even with these limitations, proxies reveal a history of frequent, dramatic ups and downs that far surpass our current mild, short-term warming.
Climate fear is based on exaggeration, selective reporting, and general ignorance about natural processes and earth history. It is perhaps the best example ever of what psychologists call a “mass formation psychosis.” The fear is artificially kept alive because it serves the interests of those with ulterior motives. Climate change has become a multinational, multi-trillion dollar industry. Countless careers, livelihoods, reputations, and fortunes are on the line. Millions conspicuously flog the issue at every opportunity to score easy virtue points and signal tribal affiliation. For battalions of ambitious would-be social engineers, climate change is the long-awaited justification for radically transforming society along utopian lines. If climate fear goes away, that dream dies and a lot of people are going to have to get real jobs.
Ultimately it is pointless to worry about things far above your pay grade. This planet is going to do what it’s going to do, regardless of what you or I or anyone else does. We are a pimple on the backside of the blue whale. And you are only a blip in time. Be the best human you can be while you’re here, don’t foul your nest, leave the place a little better than you found it, and everything else will take care of itself.
*We are at the far right edge of the graph, at the end of that long steady decline.
©2025 by Scott P. Snell
Permission to reuse is freely granted with proper attribution