By P Gosselin
Climate alarmists have been brainwashed to feel existential dread, says ex-climate activist Lucy Biggers in a new interview.
Ms. Biggers, once a leading climate activist until recently, provides the details regarding why she changed her mind and views on current climate alarmism, discussing a progressive timeline between 2020 and 2025 where she deprogrammed herself from climate alarmism.
Schellenberger and Koonin
One of the major turning points came around 2020, when she began secretly reading books that directly challenged the apocalyptic climate narrative. Specifically, she cites Michael Shellenberger’s Apocalypse Never and Steve Koonin’s Unsettled, the latter of which opened her eyes to the idea that extreme weather patterns are not matching the catastrophic claims pushed by the media.
Glimpse at dystopia
Secondly, the 2020 lockdowns provided a massive wake-up call regarding what “Net Zero” measures actually look like in practice. She realized that despite the global economy completely shutting down and individuals losing their freedoms, global carbon emissions only dropped by about 5%. This made her question the authoritarian nature and feasibility of the movement’s goals.
Realization it’s a destructive mindset
Thirdly, having her first son in 2022 forced her to establish healthier emotional boundaries and take stock of her values. She realized she did not want to pass down a destructive mindset of existential dread and perpetual guilt for consuming resources in a modern world to her children.
What’s really driving the alarmists?
Lucy notes several overlapping psychological, social, and ideological reasons why activists adopt an alarmist mindset, explaining that within left-wing spaces, the prevailing narrative is that being Western, white, or privileged makes you inherently complicit in historical oppression. For many activists, the climate movement serves as a psychological mechanism to “atone for the sins of their birth” by fighting for oppressed or indigenous groups against “evil fossil fuel companies.”
Attention-seeking
Another factor is social pressure and the algorithmic fgeedback loop: Social media and workplace communication tools (like Slack) create an intense “groupthink” environment. Activists get hooked on a constant dopamine feedback loop of validation, moral superiority, and professional accolades when they post alarmist content.
I just started covering that as a 25-year-old… and all the videos that I made went really viral and so there was a feedback loop of I’m getting a lot of professional success from this and so I just made climate change my kind of whole personality and beat for my 20s…”
Conversely, pushing back causes severe social anxiety and the fear of being ostracized as an “enemy.”
Addiction to self-importance
Lucy highlights that the apocalyptic thinking has deep religious undertones, satisfying a modern craving for meaning and legacy. Activists become “addicted to the nihilism” and the intoxicating self-importance of believing they are saving the world from an end-times scenario.
…you get the nihilism, you get addicted to the nihilism, you get addicted to your your own sense of self-importance, you get addicted to the fact that you are right and other people are wrong and then the engagement you receive on social media—it’s a constant feedback loop.”
Biggers adds:
I remember anytime I used to get a critique when I was still in this groupthink, I would spiral… because my sense of self was built on sand. Like I truly was just constantly pinging the group to be like ‘What are my opinions, am I a good ally, am I a good ally, am I doing everything right to show that I’m like part of this movement?’ And it was so exhausting…”
Gore’s propaganda led to “existential dread”
According to Lucy Biggers, her intense anxiety and worry about the climate at an early age was triggered by watching the documentary film An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore, explaining that she was a sophomore in high school (16 years old) in 2006 when her school played the film during a widespread high school assembly. Lucy describes the overwhelming psychological impact it had on her, which included existential dread and the feeling of having been handed a death sentence
Based on what she took away from the movie, she calculated a timeline for her own survival, stating, “I’m 16, I have till I’m 26… I have 10 years to live… I was racked by anxiety like in my nervous system”.
Makes me wonder – once it is well known that their entire generation was lied to, what do they do? My only reference is cold war Russian kids.
you don’t need cold war Russian children.
Watch the film Mr Nobody against Putin and you get the first hand take on how modern brainwashing works..
Then, Go and watch the report “Hong Kong no longer replies” and you can see it’s a new fascism has appeared pushed along by China and Russia – “with help from my friends” (North Korea).
Orwell has it spot on, 1984=2024.
I never head of her, but it sounds she was actively misleading people.
As penance, I suggest her speaking out publicly about current problems with climate alarmism, like
– the latest RealClimate article using the same measured data with and without confidence intervals in different graphs and model data without them, they seem strangely optional there.
– there seem to be significant problems modeling solids in the atmosphere (there are recent articles about falling ice and dust size distribution:
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2025GL120130
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2025MS005420
these are two easy examples how science progressed in ways not foreseen in older models causing the need to reevaluate even the latest CMIP6 models.
– older model results are presented in the way they were calculated years ago, but resolution and physics has improved and we now know better.
The world needs advocates to remove or correct obsolete climate publications!
(For example there were five or six articles about the rcp8.5 being implausible on here in the last two weeks, when in fact CMIP6-models clearly show -without any doubt or wiggle room- that all CMIP5 and older models significantly lack resolution and physics, which requires a reevaluation of their results!)
– and my all-time favorite, the potential proxy selection bias McShane and Wyner discuss in their rejoinder,
https://www.blakemcshane.com/Papers/aoas_rejoinder.pdf
“”the application of ad hoc methods to screen and exclude data in-
creases model uncertainty in ways that are unmeasurable and uncorrectable””
which seems to be a problem for literally any of the many ten thousands of publications using proxy reconstructions. It would be great to task someone to get a scientific answer to that problem from Mann, Bradley, Hughes and the likes ..
Lucy is speaking out.. She has been on the “Climate Reality Show” at least once, maybe more times.
Yes, and she was the first presenter in the “Youth Panel” at Heartland’s April 8-9 conference in Washington DC, I have hers cued up in their video of the complete panel presentations – I was there in person to see it, including the interruption by the hapless idiot from the Climate Defiance group (that interruption happens at the 20:41 point; at first I thought it was a comedy skit bit she was surprising the audience with)
There is a shocking lack of views and a very scant comment section below this video.
I recommend it to be shown to your kids and young people – recommend it to them.
“I never head of her, but it sounds she was actively misleading people.”
I think she was speaking the truth as she knew it. She did not realize she was misleading people. Now, she has seen the light.
I think we will see a lot more people waking up to reality in the future as the Human-caused Climate Change meme unravels. And it is unraveling, despite the Happy Talk of the Alarmists.
It’s hard to believe it got this far, but when politicians and big money/big control are involved then: Look Out!
The people seem to now be slowly correcting this situation.
Happy Ass Talk
all HAT and no cattle ….
😉
see my comment above. Will you condemn her for life because she was wrong and believed the propaganda when she was younger?
HAT is what the alarmists do .You say she is one of them?
Sheesh.
And Tom nailed the alarmists for HAT.
Not her.
T.A. “And it is unraveling, despite the Happy Talk of the Alarmists.”
Alarmist = HAT.
Every time I see the acronym CMIP, I see CHIMP, and imagine an infinite number of monkeys programming a climate model.
Jeff, I think that’s how they do it!
Wow!! Good to read you!
I am a big fan of your posts over on CA some years ago!
I believe CHIMPS (lol, yeah that is infectious) are a possible way for accountability. Each new generation seems to line up with a new IPCC report and to a large extent seems supposed to form a base for it!?
If there are significant changes between CHIMPS (as they were between monkey generations 5 and 6), it seems scientific to conclude that whatever was written in the old report is now shown to be wrong as the “climate scientists” don’t bother to apply new knowledge (see my more current examples above) to old conclusions.
Technically, they do not become wrong, it is just the confidence in the old statements gets lower with every discovered mistake or lack in resolution and physics.
Between 5 and 6 that degrading of confidence was rather significant (affecting all older models as well), yet alarmists did not react/retract in response, which makes their continuous use of old results fraudulent!
There is little more anti-scientific than ignoring knowledge!
Lol, I know you know that, but I am trying to educate newer readers potentially using you (if you are willing) to correct/refine my ramblings if needed..
She is speaking out. I think she has her own podcast and she is definitely on many other’s podcasts fighting the good fight. She is very knowledgeable and does a great job. Being able to talk about it from the other side and sharing her story of her previous beliefs I think is probably very helpful in helping others to rethink things. I see her all the time on FB short videos as main posts but also the ones that you have to click on to see (shorts).
In addition to what other’s have pointed out, she now also writes for the Free Press and is active on social media, so I would say she is pursuing multiple channels to reach people and she is an effective advocate for sanity.
I can also recommend research and publications by MIT-Professor Richard Lindzen and Princeton-Professor William Happer!
Simple questions led me to understanding. “If climate change is an existential crisis, why do greens have such a problem with nuclear?” – A simple question which exposes the cultist heart of the movement.
… If climate change is an existential crisis, why do greens have such a problem with nuclear? ...
That is a wonerful climate-crisis rejoinder, which instantly exposes the fallacy of CAGW beliefs.
An even simpler version would be: A traveler is stranded in the dessert with no hope of survival. Suddenly an automobile appears, fully fueled and ready to save the traveler. But he refuses the ride, saying “No, I don’t like to ride in automobiles”
What kind of dessert? Cheesecake?
I curse all homophones which are spelled differently!
(desert [abandon] dessert [tasty treat])
:-]
😎
Ice cream won’t last long in a desert.
Just deserts for the CAGW crowd.
A Berliner
Yeah, kids in Germany absolutely love JFK “Ich bin ein Berliner!” and want to be jelly donuts too when they grow up!
Eric, not if they believe nuclear is also inherently dangerous to the point of destroying all life on earth. Some people think that nuclear power plants can become nuclear bombs. They have heard silly exaggerations of Chernoble and Fukishima and Three Mile Island their entire life. But, I understand what you mean!
Well, that problem is solvable by education! Any engineered object can be made safer and less wasteful.
Just don’t expect the companies to do such on their own, they have a shareholder responsibility to maximize profit.
They’re the sort who watched “The 100” and believed all the crazy unscientific BS in it.
So many ways that show could have been a truly excellent one but the plot was a stinky turd. Such a shame with all the effort put into sets, costumes, props, and invented languages with several dialects.
Jane Fonda. The China Syndrome.
It’s part of growing up to realise that you don’t know everything.
Historically, the youth were respected for their energy and enthusiasm while the elderly were respected for their wisdom and experience.
Now, with social media, the energy and enthusiasm gets the ad views and so the algorithm promotes them. It’s not nuance that makes the money.
Social Media is the problem. And it’s a problem for all political viewpoints.
Social Media doesn’t care about the truth, just the attention gained.
Al Gore, the Kook, was before social media. Leftist just have a thinking problem…they don’t.
AI tells me, “Religion is a culturally shared system of beliefs, rituals, moral teachings, and communal practices that connect people to what they regard as sacred, ultimate, or transcendent, and that provide frameworks for meaning, identity, and purpose.”
The essential components …
Sacred or ultimate reality
Beliefs and narratives
Rituals and practices
Moral and ethical frameworks
Community and identity
Meaning-making
Sound familiar?
… religious cult … ?
…you get the nihilism, you get addicted to the nihilism, you get addicted to your your own sense of self-importance, you get addicted to the fact that you are right and other people are wrong and then the engagement you receive on social media—it’s a constant feedback loop.”
This perfectly describes nearly all internet conspiracy theorists I’ve ever encountered. They love thinking that they’re privy to information or a realization that escapes everyone else, thus, they feel superior. It stokes the ego. Everyone else is either a shill or “sheeple”. When you challenge them, especially with facts, they become aggressively defensive, as if it’s a personal insult to disagree with them. “How dare you question my superior position? Are you calling me stupid?”…to quote the great Ronald Reagan, it isn’t that they’re ignorant, it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so. Same with the climate cultists.
Was safe and effective an internet conspiracy? Covid originated in a wet market?
C-19 culled the herd of sick, old people warehoused in badly run (blue) Medicaid elder care.
Most People are trying to figure out the world they live. That is the primary job of a human being.
Some people turn to conspiracy theories as a short-cut to explaining the things they see.
All of us assume too much at times and we need to guard against doing so, as invalid assumptions will lead us astray, sometimes with horrendous results, like stealing the future away from the kids by telling them CO2 is going to destroy that future.
We will all be ok as long as there are skeptics included in the dialog. 🙂
‘I thought climate change was a hoax. Now I’ve changed my mind’
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-67483064
She’s just a moron like you, who got sucked into the climate ideology. It’s a cult thing.
I read the link you posted. I also went to the Citizens Climate Lobby website that was mentioned.
The lady in the article is a great example of social media and social interaction controlling beliefs rather than learning how the science is done and the facts on the ground.
The lobbying website has nothing about educating people on the science, only about educating people on how to politically lobby. That “climate change” is a given is their fundamental fact that is taken for granted.
You couldn’t have picked a better example of what the Ms. Biggers has learned and the process than the link you shared.
Jim, the problem is just by reading the link you did 100% more research than s/he did. and unfortunately wasted your time if you think that you can make intelligent points that s/he will understand.
Attention…
Stop using fossil fuels, you true believer.
“Stop using fossil fuels,”
But it cannot do that.
It’s very existence, and that of the society it lives in, RELIES TOTALLY on the many benefits of the use of fossil fuels.
I’m 100% sure that all the fake predictions and lies, besides the name calling, forced groupthink, gaslighting and cancelling convinced her that It’s true.
Global Warming – the purest form of science since the Ice Age scare.
Remember Fauci’s butt buddies Dr.Anderson and Dr.Gerry.
At the time the Virus was released they started talking about the Lab Origin of the Virus.
After they were contacted by Fauci and given 17 mio in grants,
they started calling everyone a crazy conspiracy theorist who talked about the lab origin.
That’s how they changed their minds.
bbc… ROFLMAO. !! The very bastion of climate FAKERY. !
That the woman seems to have zero idea that the problem, or non-problem is science-based is no surprise. These people, including usernameretarded who posted it are just not very adept with even knowing that science and the scientific method exist. I think there was a time when the BBC actually knew it involved science but were pushing the propaganda anyway based on their anachronistic, “legacy” political beliefs. Now I’m not so sure about them even knowing it involves science, and the BBC continues to be a somewhat successful propaganda organization. I suppose all is going to be well that ends well, as framing everything as a social and political construct means that they’re subject to being voted out, as is happening now. Still somewhat frustrating that they will never know why they were wrong all along though.
She is such a breath of fresh air, and I highly recommend watching the entire show if you haven’t already. I wish every True Believer including my two sisters would listen to her, but that is the problem with True Believers: They don’t want to hear anything from what they consider to be “the enemy”, including (or maybe even especially) a former Believer. They already have to have some doubts, the seeds of deprogramming within. I don’t know if they have that, and we don’t talk about any of it. As in many families I imagine, it is a taboo subject.
The problem is, how much damage has she done and how many young people were negatively influenced by her in the past? Not judging your sisters (mine is the same) but if they weren’t influenced by her to become “True Believers” they were influenced by people like her. Kinda like running a stop sign and causing an accident then just driving away like nothing happened. Just because she was able to change her mind doesn’t absolve her from the damage she has inflicted.
I disagree. There are truly some in the Climatist Movement who should have known better, and who should be held to account, but not someone like her. She is now an active, and very persuasive ally, and that is all that matters.
Even Ronald Reagan started out as a democrat. When you realize the error of your ways, go and sin no more…
……. and Donald Trump, and Tulsi Gabbard, and I’m sure many more. When I arrived in the States, I leaned Democrat with a capital D then. What have they become?
So what, apart from publicly admitting her error; regretting that—as a child, in school no less—she didn’t spot the holes in Gore’s terrible propaganda, and now working to reverse some of the damage, what would you have her do?
She is not a literal hit-and-run driver, nor anything like. She was betrayed by the adults who should have been looking out for her in school. Insisting her naivety is an indelible stain is as ridiculous as it is harsh.
Let’s reserve the serious opprobrium for Al Gore.
One quality she has, in addition to being very intelligent is gumption. It’s a Scottish word meaning bravery, and a willingness to work at something until you get it right, and not simply accepting what other people tell you is right. If a beer can tab is the best thing to fix your fancy motorcycle, then that is indeed what you should use.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/gumption
the ability to decide what is the best thing to do in a particularsituation, and to do it with energy and determination
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
—Carl Sagan, astronomer and writer (1934-1996)
WUWT is not immune, i.e. GHE.
Problem is, you are not immune and too immature to admit you are wrong.
Well done, Lucy. Now, let’s work on abuse of the word “like”.
AGW belief is not a two way street when it comes to reconciliation by the adherents. AGW skeptics are gaining believers and alarmists are losing them. Those that believed the fear and doom propaganda by the media are now swayed by the economic and reliability facts that they see and feel.
Does any reader/commenter know what really led ScenarioMIP to declare 8.5 “implausible?”
The reason they gave in their paper is balderdash. Economics never interfered with any climate hoaxster’s flimflam. Of course, that means OTHER peoples’ economics, since THEIRS clearly benefited from the scam.
I really haven’t seen a plausible rationale for their repudiation of their multi-decadal cause celebre, and I can’t help but speculate – with no evidence, by the bye, but that’s just following their example…
NOTE: I watched the WUWT video “The Death of RCP8.5 | Roger Pielke Jr” and it does a good job of outlining RCP8.5 history and flaws, but it doesn’t really address WHY they finally admitted it was fundamentally impossible (that’s the real meaning of their euphemistic “implausible”).
It seems to me (though I may be wrong) that a significant cause is the strategic switch to using AI to control society. The purpose of the climate change scare was societal control, it had nothing to do with the climate or science. With the growing apparent capabilities of AI, those who wish to exert their power over vast numbers of people have switched to focus on that. AI requires vast amounts of power though, so it is incompatible with the climate alarmist strategies. As such, we see those strategies just abandoned, sometimes without any rational explanation, and other strategies embraced. The plan seems to be to use AI as a ubiquitous technocratic bureaucrat “class” whose purpose is to unceasingly and unfeelingly monitor the actions of everyone in order to exert total control. Orwell assumed that there was probably no-one watching the telescreens, but you couldn’t be sure. In this future, you are guaranteed that your “telescreen” is being watched always.
Very nice. This issue will be settled by the tax payer and the rate payer. When a sizable minority of them realize how badly they have been lied to and cheated CAGW will be gone. It is that simple.
The problem now is that the tax payer and rate payer have limited and in many cases minority input on how their money, which the government took from them under threat of force, is used.
With the advent of near universal suffrage, the ability for those who subsist off the redistribution of tax payers’ money by the government to vote themselves more resources has now eventuated in many places. People who are a net drain on the system cannot have a say on how the resources of the system are distributed, this creates a moral hazard that will be (and is) exploited by politicians. This situation is unlikely to change though, as it would require people who have no business exercising political franchise to voluntarily give it up (to effectively vote to remove their right, albeit temporarily, to vote).
The CAGW scare will go away when it is no longer useful to the aims of those who push it. These aims are primarily about exerting power and control over vast numbers of people. If they determine that due to a natural cooling cycle, the claims of CAGW will no longer be sustainable, or if they consider that a better method of exerting control could be used, it will just stop. There will be no apology for getting it wrong, no explanation of why it stopped, it will just stop. Another fear will take its place, that much is guaranteed, there will always be some existential threat that must be feared, because fear is the most powerful tool of control yet devised.
Although I was never a crusader for climate, I faced a few years of existential dread as there seemed to be an endless stream of news articles promoting climate alarm. I am an ‘elder Millennial’ so when I was growing up we were drilled about plastic pollution and the loss of the Amazon rainforest. When An Inconvenient Truth came out while at university when my mind was ripe for change and new ways of thinking, and catastrophic climate change was front and center. It was a long road back to sanity, both of those books mentioned as well as WUWT were instrumental in deconstructing the alarm in my head. Once you begin to see the patterns, them relying on bad models which are known to be faulty, picking worst case scenarios, ignoring or hand waving inconvenient data, relying on ‘consensus’ and using weasel words constantly makes it clear there is an agenda far beyond any actual science. So once again thanks to all the authors, moderators and commentators for this site, as a recovering ‘alarm addict’ it really is helping.
As a meteorologist, it took me a few months of study in 1988 to realize that James Hansen was wrong about the science. It took about 3 decades to learn what was going on with the climate narrative, and how deep it goes. It is not really about the climate at all.
Lucy Biggers is essentially confirming everything I have learned. We in the West are in a 5th generational war with Luciferian globalists. (I call them Luciferian because they act like Lucifer, not that they worship Lucifer.) 5th generational warfare is a war of narratives, and Ms. Biggers tells us just how far the narrative against the West has progressed. It is deeply ingrained in our society and in our technology. It pervades our education system, as well as our media, politics, and institutions.
The war is about paving the way for the New World Order, which is a very nice way of saying ‘the enslavement of humanity’. The Luciferian globalists want that, and the only way they will get it is if we are so deluded that we willfully turn it over to them. Climate, immigration, feminism, race relations, COVID, and many other narratives, are all weapons in this 5th generational war, that the vast majority of people are not even slightly aware of.
Revealing the war to the sleeping masses is enough to defeat the Luciferian globalists, but we need more people to understand that it is actually happening.
If you understand that Lucy had a conversion, a discontinuous break in a belief system, then you will see it in the proper context.
As such, celebrate her conversion as a sign of hope that many, many more people could have the same experience and refrain from impugning either her integrity nor her intelligence.
Remember, at an impressionable age she was exposed to a propaganda work of disinformation utilising cunning and rhetoric and the intention to deceive. Even the idea that the globe of the earth was a Photo-shopped image where the clouds were made to disappear over a large percentage of the visual field, a lie uttered without words. It takes years to return a growing adult to be wary of “seeing is believing” applied to picture when it is so valuable when applied to real life observation.