No, science did not declare the climate crisis over

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Mark Leiren-Young is the author of Greener Than Thou: Surviving the Toxic Sludge of Canadian Eco-Politics and the host of the Skaana podcast.

Did scientists just declare the climate crisis over? Not so much. But America is finally taking a climate report seriously. Sort of.

The European Geosciences Union released a new paper declaring that their worst-case climate modelling, which most political leaders have been ignoring for the last 15 years, is not likely coming to pass. Suddenly, the U.S. President, who doesn’t believe in science, has become a true believer in the infallibility of science.

Donald Trump declared on social media that the climate crisis – or as he likes to put it, the “GREEN NEW SCAM” – is over, and cited the EGU in his announcement that previous UN projections were “WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!”

A more accurate assessment would be a single ”wrong” in lower case letters, minus the exclamation mark. The EGU didn’t so much concede that the apocalypse had been cancelled – just that it was downgraded to Armageddon.

The original projections – which were considered a bit overheated even in climate science circles – turned out to be too pessimistic about our fuel use. This was in part because some governments took climate science seriously – like China’s embrace of EVs. Meanwhile, it wouldn’t surprise anyone if Mr. Trump mandated replacing Teslas with cars powered by coal and/or the tears of environmentalists.

After reading Mr. Trump’s dismissal of “bogus research,” I thought I’d check out the other headlines that have popped up since the U.S. President proclaimed victory in the war against “Climate Alarmism.”

Here are a few of the climate-related stories that have made the news in the last week or so.

Everyone in France is baking like a baguette in that country’s hottest ever May. Glaciers in the Pamir mountains in Asia – which were defying the melting fad that has hit global ice like a geological version of “six-seven” – have started melting. And pilgrims are dying of heat exhaustion en route to Mecca.

Here in Canada, Prime Minister Mark Carney was carbon-captured by Alberta, prompting former environment minister Steven Guilbeault’s resignation from federal politics to spend more time climbing the CN Tower with his family.

And of course, everyone is still bracing for the annual event formerly known as summer, now called “fire season.”

Phew. Glad everything is fine!

One of the awesome and annoying things about science is that it evolves with the data – which is why scientists seldom break out the exclamation marks, never mind issue reports in all caps. These are people who do their crossword puzzles with pencils.

About the same time as the UN ditched their doomsday modelling, a report was released revealing that studies around the abundance of microplastics were tainted because pretty much everyone conducting the research was wearing latex gloves, which were, of course, shedding microplastics. Oopsie.

This doesn’t mean that every animal on Earth isn’t eating plastic, that there aren’t swirling gyres of garbage polluting the ocean, or that plastic pollution isn’t a problem everywhere from the top of Everest to the bottom of the sea. It means one metric was off. And unlike politicians or corporations, who would cover up an inconvenient truth, scientists publicly admitted the error and set out to review the earlier reports and revisit the research. Silly science.

Although, speaking of inconvenient truths: Whenever anyone other than Nostradamus ties a doomsday scenario to a specific date, they do tend to end up with microplastic on their face.

Just after the EGU shared their less sexy climate models, a Pew survey showed that only 68 per cent of Americans believe that extreme weather events are happening more often in the U.S. than they used to. This is compared with the 97 per cent of scientists who actually review data instead of Reddit threads.

Only 48 per cent of Americans now think humans are responsible for the extreme weather trashing everything from forests to glaciers to coral reefs. Twelve per cent either think nothing abnormal is going on, or maybe that it’s Barack Obama’s fault and he’s really Kenyan and therefore not human. Apparently everyone else is waiting to see what Steven Spielberg tells us about aliens in Disclosure Day.

So the scientists who got their modelling wrong really shouldn’t worry about their error. And if the response to the new – but still dire – climate projections is to double down on fossil-fuel use, they can rejoice: those doomsday scenarios could still come true.