By Vijay Jayaraj
Three years ago, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres told reporters that “the era of global boiling has arrived.” In September he repeated the alarm. Launching the U.N.’s first report on temperature “overshoot,” he declared, “Humanity is speeding past the limit to avoid climate catastrophe.”
Guterres’ hysteria rests on three weak legs: a worst-case scenario that its own authors have now abandoned, a “pre-industrial” baseline drawn from one of the coldest centuries in 2,000 years, and almost total silence about warm periods that preceded multi-megawatt power plants and SUVs by hundreds and thousands of years.
Start with the scenario. For more than a decade, a computer-based hypothetical case called RCP8.5 and its successor SSP5-8.5 drove the most frightening projections of flooded coasts and failed harvests. They assumed a world of 12 billion people by 2100 and a near tenfold rise in coal use, a future predicted by no energy market.
This April, the modelers who design scenarios for the next generation of climate simulations conceded the point. Their projections of high levels of carbon dioxide emissions (CO2) had become “implausible,” and their update showed about 0.9 degrees Celsius less warming by century’s end. In August, the U.S. government proposed amending its Fifth National Climate Assessment so that results based on earlier projections can no longer be labeled “expected” or “business-as-usual.”
Now examine the yardstick. Every headline about crossing a 1.5-degree threshold measures warming from an 1850-1900 average. Those decades sit at the end of the Little Ice Age, an era when “livestock died, harvests failed, and humans suffered.” Choose the bottom of a cold trough as zero and every degree of recovery reads like a fever.
The most serious misdirection is what the panic merchants leave out. Earth’s climate swung widely long before anyone burned coal. A 2013 reconstruction in Science found that in comparison to today, intermediate Pacific waters were 2.1 degrees warmer during the Holocene Thermal Maximum 8,000 years ago and about 0.65 degrees warmer during the Medieval Warm Period 1,000 years ago. Tree rings from Finnish Lapland show that earlier estimates of warmth were too low.
Alaska’s retreating Mendenhall Glacier has exposed upright spruce and hemlock stumps more than 1,000 years old, a forest that grew where ice later advanced. At the Schnidejoch pass, more than 8,000 feet up in the Swiss Alps, melting ice has yielded more than 300 artifacts left by Neolithic, Bronze Age, Roman, and medieval travelers who crossed the mountains when the route was open. Certainly, temperatures warmer than today had prevailed.
Forecasts of heat-induced doom overlook the benefits of today’s elevated levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. A NASA-led study found that a quarter to half of Earth’s vegetated land grew significantly greener over a 35-year period, with CO2 fertilization explaining 70% of the gain. The year after the world supposedly crossed the threshold of 1.5 degrees, the world’s farmers brought in a record cereal harvest, according to FAO data.
Humans have always faced weather hazards. Floods, droughts, storms, heat waves, crop failures, and changing rainfall existed before the industrial age. They will exist whether a theoretical global average temperature is 1.8 degrees Celsius or 2.8 degrees above an arbitrary baseline. The question is not whether risk exists, but how people respond to it.
And this is where having energy supplies that are reliable, affordable, and abundant helps people manage nature’s challenges. Economies that become more prosperous, maintain reliable systems, strengthen infrastructure, and reduce vulnerabilities will do more to protect human beings from climatic hazards even if they do not satisfy U.N. emission targets.
The future trajectory of CO2 emissions will be influenced overwhelmingly by the growth of energy demand in Asia and Latin America. There can be no justification for telling developing societies there that they must remain poor so that wealthy nations can preserve a global temperature target that has no scientific basis.
The U.N. fabricated an emergency, using a scenario its own modelers now call implausible, employing a baseline estimated rather than observed, and erasing warm eras that ancient farmers, traders, and travelers lived through. That is not science, but stagecraft performed for power and self-enrichment as it made the rest of the world poorer.
Originally published at Town Hall, October 19th, 2026.
Vijay Jayaraj is a Science and Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Fairfax, Virginia. He holds an M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia and a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, both in the U.K., and a bachelor’s in engineering from Anna University, India. He served as a research associate with the Changing Oceans Research Unit at University of British Columbia, Canada.
