Essay by Eric Worrall
Apparently the IPCC is the main bulwark *against* climate alarmism?
How Trump can buy some global climate sanity for less than $2 million
The IPCC’s rigor keeps a lid on alarmism. The U.S. is needed to make sure that doesn’t change.
February 4, 2026 at 6:15 a.m. ESTYesterday at 6:15 a.m. EST
By Bjorn Lomborg
Bjorn Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and author of “False Alarm” and “Best Things First.”
The Trump administration’s effort to audit international commitments through the lens of fiscal discipline and national interest is forcing a reckoning for global institutions. While some of these bodies may struggle to justify their continued funding under rigorous scrutiny, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change deserves a reconsideration.
Here is the inherent dilemma: The IPCC has long been the world’s most effective bulwark against climate alarmism. By rigorously summarizing the underlying science — which remains largely unalarming — it has restrained extreme narratives and forced policy debates back to evidence. …
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The United States faces a choice at this pivotal moment. Withdrawing completely, as the Trump administration has said it will do, means surrendering influence over the IPCC’s direction — ceding control to alarmists, adversaries and less rigorous voices. The result will be more politicized exaggeration, more scare stories and more global alarmism.
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Staying in the IPCC could also avoid an even worse barrage of scare stories. For example, IPCC reports have long shown little support for the recurrent claims about surging hurricanes, floods, droughts and wildfires. Yet, the selection of authors for the next major report — due in 2029 — tilts toward “extreme event attribution” advocacy, which yields not scientific insight but narratives better suited for media impact and litigation against fossil fuel companies. One of the new lead authors has pushed her own politics by linking climate change to issues like inequality, colonialism and racism.
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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/02/04/ipcc-trump-climate-science-global-warming-sanity/
Bjorn Lomborg founded the Copenhagen Consensus Center. He mostly takes the position of agreeing with IPCC science, but arguing against the economic fundamentals of proposals for radical climate action.
Bjorn Lomborg might experience some professional discomfort if the IPCC becomes more radical, his narrative has long resided in the gap between the more restrained segments of IPCC product and the unhinged alarmism which activists want the public to hear. If as Bjorn argues, the source of that restraint is US funding and influence, US withdrawal will cause that gap Bjorn operates in to close pretty quickly.
The problem with Lomborg’s suggestion for preventing increasing radicalisation of the IPCC is, once the money is paid, the leverage is gone.
Unless the USA was to micromanage every cent, pay in small instalments, dictating the outcomes it wants to see in reports, it would never achieve the kind of influence required to divert activist lunatics from inserting their own garbage conclusions. They would take the money, smile, then do what they wanted to do anyway.
After all, what would the USA do when IPCC activist scientists laughed in the face of their US sponsors? Threaten to withhold funding next time? Sanction individual activist scientists? There are plenty of other activist scientists who would happily take the place of any sanctioned activists.
In addition, any attempt to micromanage the IPCC process the way I just described would rightly be seen as pay to play – demanding predetermined outcomes in return for money. There are already enough accusations of political interference with the existing IPCC process, including complaints about content oversight boards which include political appointees.
But a wholly irrational IPCC full of naked political activism would destroy its own credibility so rapidly, in a short time nobody would care what they had to say. A bit like how trust in the WHO crashed after how badly they bungled the Covid outbreak.
In my opinion President Trump is better off doing what he is currently doing – laying the foundations of a new institutions with leadership committed to evidence based science. US institutions which can argue toe to toe against the activism and empty irrationality of broken international bodies.
Trying to rescue failed international institutions from their folly is just throwing good money after bad.
