Ted Nordhaus’s Epiphany – Watts Up With That?

Ted Nordhaus deserves a nod for doing what few in the climate establishment ever do: admitting he was wrong. In his essay “I Thought Climate Change Would End the World. I Was Wrong” (The Free Press, Oct. 19, 2025), Nordhaus concedes that his worldview “was built on apocalyptic models sprung from faulty assumptions”. That sentence alone marks a watershed moment in the long, strange saga of climate alarmism. It’s rare to see one of the movement’s own architects confess that its foundations were exaggerated, its projections implausible, and its tone hysterical.

Nordhaus co-founded the Breakthrough Institute, an organization that has long tried to make climate activism sound reasonable by marrying environmental rhetoric to talk of innovation and modernization. For years, he and his colleagues accepted the central dogma—that the planet faced an existential crisis unless humanity swiftly abandoned fossil fuels. They were not content to question the science; they amplified it. “The heating of the earth,” Nordhaus once wrote in 2007, “will cause the sea levels to rise and the Amazon to collapse and… trigger a series of wars over basic resources like food and water”.

Now, almost two decades later, he confesses that such scenarios were never plausible. The old models assumed “high population growth, high economic growth, and slow technological change”—a trifecta of contradictions that cannot coexist. He points out that fertility rates are falling, economies are decarbonizing on their own, and technological progress accelerates efficiency regardless of political slogans. His admission is blunt: “I no longer believe this hyperbole.”

That’s refreshing honesty.

More remarkable still is Nordhaus’s acknowledgment that the so-called “worst-case” scenarios—those beloved by headline writers and politicians—have been quietly revised downward. “Most estimates of worst-case warming by the end of the century now suggest three degrees or less,” he writes, yet “the reaction among much of the climate science and advocacy community has not been to become less catastrophic”. Instead, the doomsday clock has simply been reset. The goalposts move, but the panic remains.

It’s a classic feature of ideological systems: when the facts soften, the rhetoric hardens.

Nordhaus even notes the extraordinary decline—over 96 percent—in global mortality from climate and weather extremes over the past century. Despite the supposed “age of extremes,” fewer people than ever are dying from heat, cold, storms, or floods. The world, far from teetering on the brink of climate apocalypse, is enjoying the safest and most technologically protected era in recorded history. Yet, as he observes, this reality has not penetrated the climate advocacy bubble.

He credits Roger Pielke Jr. for showing that, once normalized for wealth and population, disaster losses have not increased with warming. The catastrophe narrative, in other words, fails its own empirical test. Nordhaus admits the data “overwhelm the climate signal,” because what determines the cost of disasters isn’t just the weather—it’s how rich, prepared, and well-built societies are.

This is where Nordhaus shines: his understanding that risk is a function of vulnerability, not temperature. A wealthy city can withstand what would devastate a poor one. A stronger economy produces better infrastructure, medicine, and recovery systems. And that, of course, is the irony of climate alarmism: the very economic growth that activists decry is what protects humanity from nature’s dangers.

He goes further still, dismantling the myth of the “accelerating catastrophe.” He notes that even in cases where warming might be slightly higher than expected, “additional anthropogenic warming is an order of magnitude less than the oscillations of natural variability”. That line should be carved into the lintel of every climate ministry on Earth. Yet it won’t be. Because once you admit that natural variation overwhelms human influence, the case for massive social reorganization collapses.

Nordhaus concedes what skeptics have said for decades: “Climate change is contributing very little to present-day disasters”. Even if one entertains the “worst-case scenarios,” the outcomes “are not remotely consistent with the sorts of catastrophic outcomes that I once believed in.”

At this point one expects him to throw off the last vestiges of belief. But Nordhaus, to his credit and perhaps to his lingering faith, doesn’t. He remains an adherent of the idea that anthropogenic warming is real, though modest; that cleaner technologies are desirable; and that innovation can be good policy. In that sense, he is a reformer, not a heretic. He has left the cathedral, but he still genuflects at its door.

Even so, his recognition of the movement’s intellectual corruption is devastating. He writes that “there are strong incentives to overestimate climate risk if you make a living doing left-of-center climate and energy policy”. The system rewards conformity. Academics, think-tankers, foundation officers, and congressional staffers—each depends on the maintenance of the “existential threat” narrative. Without that, the money dries up.

He calls it what it is: “The climate movement has effectively conflated consensus science about the reality and anthropogenic origins of climate change with catastrophist claims about climate risk, for which there is no consensus whatsoever”. That distinction between modest warming and apocalypse is the very distinction that has been erased in public debate.

Nordhaus is right again when he identifies the sociological roots of this hysteria. He cites research showing that highly educated people are more prone to error when facts threaten their political identities. In other words, the smarter you are, the easier it becomes to rationalize your ideology. It’s a dangerous cocktail: intelligence mixed with conformity.

He also takes aim at the notion that fear is necessary to spur innovation. “There is no evidence whatsoever,” he writes, “that 35 years of increasingly dire rhetoric… have had any effect on the rate at which the global energy system has decarbonized”. Indeed, the planet decarbonized faster before climate change became a cause célèbre. That’s a stunning admission from one of the movement’s intellectuals. If the sermons don’t speed progress, what’s the point of the religion?

Nordhaus’s answer is uncomfortable but true: the climate establishment “is actually after something different… a rapid and complete reorganization of the global energy economy.” Not modest improvement—revolution. And, as he admits, “there is no good reason to do that absent the specter of catastrophic climate change.”

This is where Nordhaus touches the third rail: the political motive. For decades, climate rhetoric has served as the scaffolding for an agenda of central control. What began as environmental concern metastasized into a technocratic movement bent on redesigning civilization. Nordhaus’s essay exposes the psychological and institutional drivers of that impulse, even if he doesn’t quite condemn them.

To his credit, he also observes that this culture of exaggeration and moral panic has made the movement “deeply out of touch with popular sentiment”. One might say the public has already performed its own cost-benefit analysis and found the apocalypse unpersuasive. Ordinary citizens sense what Nordhaus now admits: the climate “crisis” is a projection, not a prediction.

Eric’s post yesterday traced the same arc—from belief to realism. Nordhaus adds intellectual flesh to that skeleton. Nordhaus reveals the sociology of it: how the right credentials and the right funding streams can blind even intelligent people to basic empirical truth.

In a way, Nordhaus’s journey mirrors that of many early believers who confused model outputs with observations and mistook correlation for causation. Yet his willingness to re-examine the evidence—and to say publicly that he was wrong—marks a break from the consensus culture that has long punished dissent.

There’s still some theology left in him; he remains, after all, an “ecomodernist,” which is just a secular way of saying “green but not crazy.” But his essay is an important crack in the facade. He has turned his back on catastrophe, and that’s no small act of courage in a world where even measured skepticism gets one excommunicated.

For that, Ted Nordhaus deserves genuine respect. He may not yet be a full skeptic, but he has done something rare in the climate priesthood: he has confessed that the prophecies were false.

And perhaps, in time, he’ll see that the real danger was never the weather. It was the arrogance of those who thought they could control it.