If Climate Science Is ‘Settled’, Why Keep Moving The Goalposts?
Substack is overflowing with climate firestorms—catastrophists predicting imminent apocalypse on one side, skeptics waving it all away on the other
This essay isn’t here to join either tribe. I’m not trying to relitigate whether the mainstream climate narrative is broadly right or wrong (though, for the record, I have serious doubts about much of it).
Instead, let’s narrow the focus to something sharper—and harder to dodge:
Even if you accept the dominant climate premises and metrics at face value, the core policy claims have repeatedly failed when tested against reality. Each failure has been followed not by accountability, but by a quiet shift to new goalposts.
From Simple Physics to Moving Targets
The original pitch was clean and confident. Atmospheric CO2 was the driver of dangerous warming. Cap it, stabilize the climate. Straightforward physics. Settled science.
Soon, that expanded to “CO2 equivalents”—all ‘greenhouse gases’ rolled into a single metric, requiring precise annual emissions estimates. Same logic: measure it, cap it, catastrophe averted.
Trillions of dollars were spent. Mandates piled up. “Energy transitions” were breathlessly hyped.
Yet atmospheric CO2 concentrations kept rising. Annual global CO2 equivalent emissions kept rising, too.
Reality refused to cooperate—so the targets began to shift.
When Cooling Was the Crisis
This isn’t the first time confidence outpaced evidence.
In the 1970s, major media outlets warned of imminent global cooling:
- Washington Post (1970): “Colder Winters Herald Start of New Ice Age”
- Time (1974): “Another Ice Age?”
- Newsweek (1975): “The Cooling World”
These headlines are now mocked as pseudoscience.
Editor’s note: the author doesn’t mention the data shows four decades of slowly falling temperatures and increasingly harsh winters up to the late 70s, until the current warming trend began in the early 80s, so the headlines mentioned reflect what the climate was doing at the time.
But a 2008 review by Peterson et al. examined 71 peer‑reviewed climate papers published between 1965 and 1979:
- Seven predicted cooling
- 20 neutral
- 44 warming
Science tilted warm; media hype diverged.
Sound familiar?
Ironclad Targets That Melted Away
The modern era followed a similar pattern of confidence—then retreat.
- 1975: The National Academy of Sciences flags CO2 warming as likely.
- 1988: IPCC forms.
- 1990: First report targets ~550 ppm CO2 (double preindustrial ~280 ppm).
That number didn’t last.
- 1990s–2000s: 550 ppm remains the benchmark
- Mid-2000s: James Hansen calls it unsafe
- 2007 (AR4): Target shifts to ~450 ppm CO2-eqivalent
- 2008: Hansen declares 350 ppm the new “safe” level
350 ppm rapidly became activist dogma, popularized by 350.org:
“To preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed… CO2 must return to at most 350 ppm.”
This was presented not as a value judgment, but as hard physics.
The Metric That Wouldn’t Behave
Preindustrial CO2 was about 277 ppm.
Today, measured at Mauna Loa, atmospheric CO2 stands at roughly 427 ppm.
Despite decades of policy, subsidies, and sacrifice, there is no visible inflection point in the post‑2000 data, below in Figure 3. The curve marches upward, indifferent to our intentions.
Ask climate advocates today what the new “safe” concentration is, and you’ll rarely get an answer. The old red lines have simply been abandoned.
Pivot #1: From Concentrations to Emissions
Once concentration targets were blown past, attention shifted to annual emissions. (See Figure 4 below)
But global emissions kept climbing—driven largely by developing economies. Western nations cut at enormous cost; China and India surged. The net result: new records.
Strike two.
Pivot #2: From Hard Data to Temperature Models
Around 2010, the framework shifted again—this time to temperature goals:
- 2°C
- then 1.5°C
- then “net zero by 2050”
Temperatures are politically convenient. They bundle all forcings into one number and rely heavily on models, adjustments, and projections.
Reported global average temperature increase since the late 19th century now sits around 1.6°C (Figure 5 below)—with intense debate over tenths of a degree, while earlier benchmarks quietly disappear.
Even prominent insiders are hedging.
Ahead of COP30, Bill Gates remarked that ‘climate change’ is NOT an existential threat—and that human well-being should take precedence over obsessing about fractional degrees.
Victory Laps on Forecasts, Not Reality
Ahead of COP30, Gates also offered a revealing example of the new logic:
Ten years ago, the IEA predicted that by 2040, the world would be emitting 50 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year. Now, just a decade later, the IEA’s forecast has dropped to 30 billion, and it’s projecting that 2050 emissions will be even lower. Read that again: In the past 10 years, we’ve cut projected emissions by more than 40 percent.
[Note: Bill is referring only to energy emissions, not [total emissions], just the ‘fossil’ CO2 portion in Figure 4]
We didn’t cut emissions. We cut a forecast.
UN reports increasingly celebrate “progress” not because emissions fell, but because models predict a slightly better future than older models once did.
Miss your targets? No problem—update the scenario and declare success.
Editor’s note: I would say that last sentence needs to be changed to ‘Miss your targets? No problem—shout even louder that the end of the world is nigh‘ then get a certain Mr Biden to declare July 2023 was the hottest in the entire history of the planet, and that if the average global temperature rises by more than 1.5C, the entire human race would be wiped out.
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Header image: Lyme Disease UK