Ingmar Rentzhog’s August 16, 2026 Forbes article “Why The 89% Climate Majority Keeps Losing” asserts that while polling shows a supposed 89% majority of people approve action to stop climate change, this ‘majority’ is seemingly unaware of how they have the public pressure power to get such action done. With particular regard to what he suggests is the disparity between having power and then using it, he offered this basic truism:
The perception gap is an information problem, and information problems can be fixed.
Yes, the climate issue problem absolutely can be fixed with more information … just in the diametrically opposite way he’s proposing.
I have to laugh whenever I get these kinds of articles results out of the daily email alert I get from Google on global warming stories – just as I did with the result I wrote about in my prior blog post on the same basic theme about a pair of ‘journalism professors’ lamenting ineffective ‘climate concern communication.’ We have one of two situations going on here, it’s embarrassing both ways. Either these kinds of article authors are oblivious to how more information about the climate issue for widespread public consumption can ultimately kill the issue completely, exposing it for the amount of actual disinformation their side puts out, or they are crossing their fingers in a fervent hope that the public accepts the claims about “settled science” / “liars-for-hire” skeptic climate scientists and never goes looking for more information to check the veracity of the claims.
At the end of my prior blog post the pair of ‘journalism professors’, I said there might be a Part 2 for it if the professors answered my curiosity question of how they – or anyone, for that matter – should respond after reactions to their predictions of impending climate doom concern simply the mere existence of skeptic climate scientists disputing such predictions. I emailed Ingmar Rentzhog with this same basic inquiry. I’m not holding my breath for a reply.
I can offer an educated guess regarding what he thinks of such skeptic scientists. Part of my guess comes out of the clickable link for what was in his line immediately following his above “perception gap” sentence:
Research shows that when people learn how many others actually support climate action, they become more willing to act themselves.
Rentzhog’s clickable link goes to a page where his readers must then click on an additional PDF file link leading to a paper on “Misperceived Social Norms and Willingness to Act Against Climate Change” which has an annoying “Uncorrected Proof” watermark on every single page (a version conveniently without that distraction is here). The paper blithely goes on at huge length about ‘misperceptions’ on what is supposedly otherwise settled science, and then offers a single assertion within its conclusion (both paper versions) relying on a dubious pair of citation sources which undercuts its entire credibility:
It is equally crucial to avoid giving undue attention to the small, vocal group that opposes climate action or even denies climate change (Boykoff & Boykoff, 2004; Oreskes & Conway, 2010), a factor that could have contributed to Americans’ underestimation of their peers’ readiness to take action.
The authors of that paper could not support the rationale behind their assertion with the sources they have if their reputations depended on it.
- The actual 2004 Boykoff & Boykoff paper doesn’t offer a word about anyone denying climate change, it only purported – falsely – to claim skeptic climate scientists were given too much ‘fair’ media coverage. I detailed the troubling 1 degree of separation between the Boykoff brothers and Ross Gelbspan (and by default his blatantly false but still famous accusation about crooked skeptic scientists being paid to “reposition global warming as theory”) in my 2011 guest post at the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s blog. The PBS NewsHour is a prime example of just how unfair news outlets have been over the last two decades.
- Oreskes – that Naomi Oreskes, who’s enslaved ( enslaved! ) to Gelbspan’s false accusation. But among the ten instances where the word “deny” actually comes up in her entire Merchants of Doubt book, only one qualifies as a direct hit on any people and she offers no support to back it up; her contention was that skeptic climate scientists’ conservative political positions and political connections and outright ideology prompted their opposition. But again, we are talking about that Naomi Oreskes, who may find herself in a world of hurt if she is obligated under oath to explain how the copies of the “reposition global warming” memos she has are only separated apparently by one degree from the copies that Al Gore first spoke about back in his 1992 book – years before Gelbspan first spoke of those beloved memos ……. despite Gore saying later that Gelbspan discovered them.
Meanwhile, back to the main topic of Ingmar Rentzhog’s Forbes article. What forms the other part of my educated guess about Rentzhog’s likely answer on what to say about skeptic climate scientists? Look no farther than within his Forbes bio page:
Ingmar is also a trained Climate Reality Leader under Al Gore.
That Al Gore, the documentary movie star who segued in his 2006 “An Inconvenient Truth” from Naomi Oreskes’ 100% science consensus study result numbers straight into his implication that a tiny handful of skeptic scientists were directed to … wait for it … “reposition global warming as theory.” The very same Al Gore who taught Climate Reality Project students what to think and say.
And where did the whole notion of not giving fair media balance come up in a prominent way? The place where Ross Gelbspan quoted alarmist climate scientist Dr Stephen Schneider as saying nobody should give fair media time to skeptics, and Al Gore implying everyone should be angry with anybody who opposes the clear science certainty.
Much like the example I pointed to in my prior blog post about overconfident ‘climate journalists’ counting on an informed public that’ll never question what is fed to them on the ‘climate crisis,’ Forbes article Rentzhog here seems to think the 89% majority he points to has some kind of majority power. More troubling is the threat he implies against anybody who dares to question any part of the man-caused global warming orthodoxy. But he ends his piece with the same faulty notion I pointed to in my prior blog post. Take Rentzhog’s words and mirror-flip them against him – the ‘proverbial light’ he sees at the end of the tunnel on getting the public fully informed on the climate issue is actually a train headed right at him that will run right over him and the entire rest of the climate issue:
The first job of the common sense movement is no longer to create a majority for stronger action against the emotion-based / anti-intellectual ‘climate crisis’ pushers. That majority already exists. The job now is to introduce the majority to the imperative to get environmental policymaking back to being fact-based / science-based, and the imperative to hold all of those who promulgated disinformation about the issue accountable in a prominent enough way that all of the public understands how they were duped and herded by a tiny minority of enviro-activists and complicit legacy news media journalists, who had far monopoly media power and dictatorial control than they ever were entitled to have.
