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. …
…
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.
…
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.
The anti American theater kids would just wait and hope the Democrats come back, and cater to them again.
The sadder part is that around the world,. people are waking up to the fact that not only are their politicians utter shit, but their potential replacements are even worse,…
Which particular camp you put Trump into depends on your prejudice.
Personally my answer is ‘both’
Really? Trump is a builder, he is based in reality and he is gutting the climatards as fast as he can.
MRDA…
Mens roller derby association? 🙂
According to Semantic Scholar:
“””
What is the slang MRDA?
Known as: MRDA, MRDA (Internet Slang) MRDA, an abbreviation for Mandy Rice-Davies Applies, is Internet slang meaning “well he would say that, wouldn’t he?”
“””
Not with my money. Take a hike. The scam is over, the UN is a slop bucket, and the gravy train has derailed. Time to get a real job.
I agree, though Lomborg makes a weakly plausible point. Anyone who dives into the Observations chapters of the IPCC reports sees that their data and analysis demonstrates that there is no impending crisis. But it’s a tiny island of science surrounded by an ocean of leftist dogma, and only nerds like me read those parts. I’ve quoted from them numerous times to refute the ridiculous claims of alarmists. It’s fun to take a wrecking ball to the buffoonery of the numerous other chapters with data from their own report.
But the Observations chapters aren’t enough reason for the U.S. to be involved in an enterprise that has been so corrupted by zealots. We should fund our own version, but not with taxpayer funds and not supervised by the leftist bureacrats and their grifters in academia who put their leftist agenda before science. It should be entirely funded by private donations. Something like the Heartland Institute’s Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC).
https://climatechangereconsidered.org/
Lomborg should consider joining.
While it may be true that a lot of the actual science presented by the IPCC is more moderate the summary for policy makers is very alarmist. The COP are alarmist in the extreme. The IPCC was formed to track the harm done by man made CO2 entering the atmosphere not to determine whether it caused harm. Lomborg is wrong, it would take very little effort for the US and like minded nations to produce honest helpful information concerning CO2. The IPCC is a miserable failure, stop wasting our time, money and resources on it.
Key point. The IPCC was set up to advise on the dangers of man made climate change, not to question its excistence
And the IPCC is indeed alarmist. From AR4 Chapter 11, “1.3 Some Unifying Themes”, if the world doesn’t take action to stop GlobalHotting™, we all are very likely gonna suffer from (scroll down to the tan-colored table list on that page):
– more hot / warm summer days
– more intense, more frequent heat waves
– more warm and fewer cold nights
– fewer frost days
– fewer, shorter, less intense cold spells / cold extremes in winter
Yeah, I just hate suffering from fewer frost days. Can’t get enough of that frostbite.
oops- canceled this one- replied in the wrong place
I hope I’m right here, but I think climate alarmism has been largely rejected regardless of how shrill the cries of its proponents have become. If fossil fuels still provide at least 82% of the world’s primary energy, if carbon emissions keep rising and consumers show increasing unwillingness to make major lifestyles changes to combat what they see as a non-problem, the entire philosophy has apparently lost whatever limited traction it ever had. Then when the general populace sees, among other things, its global numbers rising along with life expectancies and agricultural output, people have come to recognize a scam once and for all and simply brush aside any new claims of a climate crisis.
A hitch in your logic is that a sizeable percentage of humanity doesn’t live in the real world. People who have given up reason for ideology are incapable of comprehending empirical reality. They exist in closed loops of perception that rejects any information outside of their fixed beliefs.
Yep.
Ideology and rationality cannot function in the same mind space at the same time.
Beliefs and feelings. Feelings count more than facts in certain strata. And effort counts more than results. It is participation trophies all around.
Feelings- too much feminism. I watched a webinar here in MA by the state’s Energy & Environment agency. Presented by 7 people- 6 were women. Not a hint that their vision of Net Zero nirvana might not be perfect. Essentially, the entire state government is now dominated by women- most agency heads and most of the rest of the leadership.
Yeah. Over here we call that percentage ‘Americans’
I wonder how many downvotes I will get.,..
Change “ALL” to “LEFTY” and “Americans” to “OCCIDENTALS”, and you’ve got it.
I have to upvote that for 2 reasons.
First, the humor element.
Second, American arrogance shown while travelling in other countries.
Too many American tourists want American food, lodging, transportation when in other countries and expect to only communicate in English.
In other words, everyone has to cow to American expectations.
Pretending that Americans are a homogenous group is ignorance personified. The adults in the room aren’t those who allowed ideology to replace reason.
Pseudoscience instead of empirical science. A point in the transition to elites telling us what the truth actually is.
People are being jailed in the EU for telling the truth.
“climate alarmism has been largely rejected”
Apparently not in much of Europe and MA, CT, CA, OR, WA, etc. Here in MA you’ll never see skepticism to the climate hoax. I try by sending links of YouTube videos and stories here, etc. to many key people in MA- politicians, environmentalists and others and hardly ever get any response.
“Copenhagen Consensus Center”
The what now? Does Big Brother work there?
I never really felt that Lomborg was a voice of reason, or sanity. He’s just sealed the deal.
Do you actually understand what the CCC does? It prioritizes problems.
CO2 is not a problem.
Calling a non-problem, a problem, is a problem.
With all due respect to Lomborg, he really misses the point with this one. Eric sums it up here nicely:
“…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.”
By the way, here I offer DAVE’s Summary For Policymakers, 7th edition, for FREE!:
There is no risk of climate harm from emissions of CO2. We looked really hard. Can’t find it – not in the past, present, or future. Nor for any of the other IR-active trace gases. This is because dynamic energy conversion within the general circulation massively overwhelms any likely value of a computed increase in the atmosphere’s IR absorbing power. The modelers have known this all along, from fundamental physical considerations represented mathematically in the simulations.
The recommended policy is therefore to assure ample supply of electricity and fuels for production, transportation, and protection from the elements. No restriction of hydrocarbon fuels is justified.
The “Social Cost of Carbon” metric is hereby set to “Zero” for all future cost-benefit analyses.
Thank you for reading my report.
As if the IPCC wasn’t already a hotbed of climate change propaganda.
I don’t think the human-caused climate change propaganda can get any more intense.
Lomborg’s problem is he believes CO2 is a problem.
The IPCC is just another attempt at the subjugation of nation states to the will of globalist authoritarians. They can’t lose influence fast enough. Moving further into alarmism will speed up their demise.
I heard a news report that said the UN is going bankrupt.
I don’t know if that is true or not, I only heard the one report. I would think if the UN was going broke it would spawn more than one news report.
The kidnapping of Savanna Guthrie’s mother has been monopolizing the news coverage on USTelevision so maybe that has something to do with it.
“I heard a news report that said the UN is going bankrupt.”
It is true. Members aren’t paying their dues most notably the US who provides the most. If we pull out they will fail like the globalist League Of Nations. We should!
The only way the US should keep funding the IPCC is if they issue a report denouncing every summary for policy makers and setting the record straight based on the data.
good idea! Trump should say that.
His argument might be true for the UN security council, but the world is better off without the IPCC.
“but the world is better off without the UN.” Slight but important change.
It is not at all clear that the U.S. currently has any “influence over the IPCC’s direction,” or that it matters.
The flip side of that coin is that membership conveys acquiescence if not out right acceptance of IPCC reports and ancillary pontifications. With this logic the US should maintain membership in all international organizations.
This opinion of Mr. Lomborg strays from his normal intellectual rigor.
“By rigorously summarizing the underlying science … — it (the IPCC)…”
Pardon my incredulous laughter.
That statement solves a problem for me. I was puzzled before, but understand, now, why Bjorn Lomborg is a warmist. He thinks consensus climatology is science.
Someone should set him straight.
Maybe Andy May can arrange a meeting through Marcel Crok, and drop the truth-bomb.
This is my feelings too. If the IPCC has been toning down the alarmism, it sure isn’t obvious. I say let them crash and burn and hoist themselves on their own petard.
From the outset IPCC was a political construct that was not formed to objectively review the science but to justify the assumption that climate change is due to human activity. Consider its charter which lays out IPCC’s marching orders.
IPCC did not fall into a black hole it started there. We know from former IPCC authors and reviewers that peer-reviewed papers which confirmed the “man bad” narrative were accepted without question even in the face of strong disagreement.
IPCC could play an important role but not by following its charter which it has followed since its founding.
I think your post need far more upvotes than I can give it.
From the outset IPCC was a political construct that was not formed to objectively review the science but to justify the assumption that climate change is due to human activity.
Going way back in history, the precursor to the IPSS was part of the UN Environmental group.
The charter was to study the climate, both natural variation and anthropogenic.
Either the first or second IPCC summary report (I forget which) was the “tipping point.”
The science report stated no discernable signature in climate variations. I think it was a representative of the Clinton-Gore Administration (I could be mistaken) edited the summary to state there is a clear signature of human influence on the climate.
At that point the models changed to demonstrate how the temperature rises with rising CO2 concentrations (aka, the “control knob”). Many scientists were outraged. Many quit. Then, the IPCC instituted new rules that required science reports be rewritten when they disagreed with the summary report. The summary report was and still is written by politicians.
From that day forward, nothing the IPCC did was credible.
No mas dinero.
I say Bjorn should fund the IPCC.
If your message tries to please everyone, it completely pleases no one.
The National Post in Canada prints many of Lomborg’s essays. Frankly, he has always struck me as a bit of an operator, by focusing on the economics while paying lip service to the evils of GHGs. He thinks he has to do this in order not to be voted off the island. He might claim that he is not a science person, but that rings hollow given the resources out there to exculpate and defend carbon dioxide. Maybe he is right to play both sides, as I observe how cults form in so many even scientific areas. Cults resist all boarders, no matter how minor the subject matter is. Funding the IPCC helps keep him in business. IPCC provides him with a diffuse target when he needs to sound contrarian to his fans.
Ultimately the way forward is realistically to shove the issue of man made climate change to one side and forget it and concentrate on what changes are actually happening and the least cost way to address them.
And that is the sea change that is happening as people realise the true cost of ‘renewables’ and ‘net zero’, in conjunction with a climate more stable than any IPCC report predicted.
Lomborg may be a useful idiot, but on whose side is he?
The IPCC should be dissolved because Carbon is such a minor player in the global climate paradigm. Much of the world still doesn’t understand that water in its multiple states has a much greater effect on surface air temperatures by by orders of magnitude.
The “dry” greenhouse gasses reach thermal effect saturation concentrations much sooner than water vapor.
There is nothing that can be accomplished by limiting greenhouse gas emissions except starving green plants. Let’s set a goal of 1200ppm to feed the world!
Bjorn Lomborg has always appeared to be a bit of a dummy, and this proposal really proves it to be true.
“The IPCC’s rigor” does NOT keep “a lid on alarmism”. The IPCC has never resisted alarmism moreover the IPCC leadership have only fueled alarmism through the leftist media worldwide as well as through flawed academic practices. Likewise the “IPCC’s rigor” has notoriously been known since long. I would not want to waste your time counting numerous claims where the IPCC was blamed for cherry-picking scientific findings, data abuse, factual errors etc., which you can easily find out quite a few on the Internet. At the present time, the IPCC is a fully discredited club of “Fiends of the Chair” composed of intentionally selected scientific experts and driven by activists and lobbyists openly promoting the global leftist agenda and vested interests of particular industries, accordingly. This nonsense must be discontinued. Clearly there is no way to support it financially.
“If I were wrong, then one [author] would have been enough!” In this way, Einstein is believed to parry a book titled “100 Authors against Einstein” that was published in Germany in 1931.
Similarly for an assessment of the current state of knowledge regarding a specific, complex global issue, such as the climatic system evolution we do not need a thousand of “experts”, who must be “regionally and gender balanced”, nominated by politically biased governments, their “non-governmental” satellites and corrupted UN bodies. We do not need the text of the Summary endorsed line-by-line by often incompetent and/or randomly nominated bureaucrats. We only need a team of a few reputable scientists selected based on their merit. Such a group may be formed of scientists representing the leading academies, which we really have very few, e.g. USA, Russia, China. They would produce an objective comprehensive scientific assessment that should be taken for granted (not debated) by policy makers. For such complex issue, as the climatic system is, we do need science-based policy, not the other way round. And no UN involved please! JMHO, though.
In this instance yes, they should definitely throw Rosemary’s baby out with the bathwater.
LOL!
The IPCC’s rigor?? Rigor Mortis he must mean.
Recommended reading for Bjorn.
https://www.amazon.com/Delinquent-Teenager-Mistaken-Worlds-Climate-ebook/dp/B005UEVB8Q
“The IPCC’s rigor keeps a lid on alarmism.”
Booo!
We need to pay protection money to IPCC or else? If we do not pay, even more rabid eco loons will come and glue themselves to annoying places? What?