Think Differently. Solve the Impossible.

How evidence, assumptions, incentives, and competing narratives shape one of the most controversial scientific and political issues of our time

Few subjects divide people as quickly as climate change.

One side may see an overwhelming scientific consensus that human activity is warming the planet and that urgent action is necessary. Another sees questionable measurements, unreliable models, political agendas, financial incentives, and scientific objections that have been dismissed rather than answered.

My conversation with researcher and author Lynne Balzer fell toward the later.

Lynne has spent more than a decade researching climate change and has written two books challenging the conventional narrative. She came to the conversation with graphs, historical documents, newspaper articles, scientific papers, and a different interpretation of how the modern climate movement developed.

Some of her conclusions were ones I agreed with. Others caused me to push back. At several points I found myself proposing alternative explanations for the same evidence. That's what made the conversation interesting.

This article based on spending time after the podcast, to review and verify (or discredit) some of what she presented. What happens when we stop asking if whether climate change is "real" and start examining the assumptions underneath the question?
 

Start With the Data

Before asking what causes climate change, there is a basic question:

How do we know the climate has changed?

That sounds simple. It isn't.

We're frequently told that the average global temperature has increased by a particular amount since the nineteenth century.

How exactly do we calculate a global temperature for 1850?

Lynne showed a map of historical temperature stations. The coverage was far from uniform. Large portions of the world had few or no measurements. Oceans cover most of the planet, yet historical ocean measurements were more limited than what is available today.

As an engineer, a question immediately occurred to me:

Were all those measurements being taken with comparable instruments, calibration, siting, procedures, and accuracy?

Is there any missing data?

I've encountered this myself while downloading historical temperature records. A weather station may have years of observations. That doesn't mean every day is represented in the database. If observations are missing for certain day, weeks, or month,  or even years,  what happens next?

Do we leave a gap? 
Estimate the value? 
Use another station? 
Apply a statistical adjustment?

None are necessarily fraudulent. Some may seem reasonable. They are still choices. Once choices enter the process, the published number is no longer "the temperature." It is a result produced through a methodology.

That matters.
 

What Are We Looking at When We See a Climate Graph?

The problem becomes interesting when we go into the past. 

To estimate the temperate before there were thermometers, scientists use proxies, physical evidence that may tell us something about past climate conditions:

Ice cores.
Tree rings.
Sediments.

Lynne explained how proxy measurements can be used to infer historical temperatures.

I immediately started asking about the chain of assumptions between what was physically measured, and the temperature placed on a graph.

Tree rings are an example. Tree growth may be affected by temperature. Tree growth is also  affected by precipitation, sunlight, soil conditions, disease, and other environmental variables.  That doesn't mean tree rings are useless. It means the scientific question is not:

Do tree rings prove the climate was warmer?

It's: 

How reliably can the effect of temperature be separated from all the other variables affecting a tree?
 

The Same Ice Data Tells Different Stories

One of the examples Lynne presented involved Arctic and Greenland ice. She showed graphs that she believed contradicted the common impression that Arctic ice is steadily disappearing.  Looking at the data, her observation are supported. Choosing the measurement and starting date dramatically changes the story a graph appears to represent.

Arctic Sea Ice: Start With the Measurements

The National Snow and Ice Data Center maintains a satellite record of Arctic sea-ice extent beginning in 1979. Its annual minimum normally occurs in September, after the summer melt season. Consider several points from that record:

Source: National Snow and Ice Data Center Sea Ice Index.

The 2025 minimum at 4.60 million square kilometers and the lowest 19 minimums have all occurred in the last 19 years. 

Look at what happens, depending on where we begin.

Start in 1979, and the decline is obvious. Start in 2008, and the endpoints are almost identical: 4.59 million km² versus 4.60 million km². Start in 2012, the record-low year, and the endpoint rises from 3.39 to 4.60 million km².

All three can be produced from the same underlying dataset.

That doesn't mean Arctic sea ice isn't declining. Over the complete satellite record, it has. NSIDC reports that Arctic September ice averaged about 6.46 million km² during the 1990s, substantially above recent September levels.

Lynne's graph raises a legitimate question:

What happens when the period we choose determines the story the reader sees?

Someone starting a graph in 1979 can accurately show a large decline.
Someone starting in 2008 can accurately show little change by the end.
Someone starting in 2012 can accurately show an increase.

The data hasn't changed.

The time frame has.
 

Seasonal Ice Creates An Opportunity for Confusion

Arctic sea ice grows and shrinks enormously every year. Arctic sea-ice extent reached approximately 15.01 million km² at its winter maximum in 2024, and then fell to approximately 4.25 million km² at its September minimum. That's a seasonal swing of more than 10 million square kilometers.

That seasonal cycle is real. 

Showing that ice grows dramatically every winter doesn't answer the climate question, any more than showing that it melts dramatically every summer does.

To investigate long-term change, we need to compare equivalent points in the cycle—September with September, for example—over many years. This illustrates another useful rule when evaluating graphs:

Make sure the things being compared are actually comparable.
 

Greenland Is Not the Same Measurement

Arctic sea ice is floating ice covering portions of the Arctic Ocean. The Greenland Ice Sheet is land ice covering Greenland.

Those aren't interchangeable things to measure. They are not interchangeable measurements.

For Greenland, NASA measures what is happening. The GRACE and GRACE-FO satellites detect changes in Earth's gravitational field, allowing scientists to estimate changes in the total mass of the Greenland Ice Sheet.

Those measurements show substantial net ice loss. NASA currently estimates that Greenland lost an average of approximately 264 giga-tons of ice per year between 2002 and 2025. The claim that Greenland has not been losing ice over the past two decades isn't supported by these satellite mass measurements.

There is another layer to the story.

Greenland Can Gain Ice in Some Places, While Losing Ice Overall

NASA's measurements don't show every part of Greenland behaving identically. Some interior regions have experienced relatively little change or gains, while substantial losses have occurred around coastal areas.

Someone could show evidence that: Ice increased here.

And someone else could say: Greenland lost ice.

Both can be true.

They answer different questions.

One describes a location. The other describes the net mass balance of the entire ice sheet.

This is why asking what was measured? matters.
 

What About the Claim That Greenland Has Been Cooling?

Lynne referred to research suggesting Greenland had been cooling, rather than warming during recent decades. There is some evidence behind that claim. Wording matters.

A peer-reviewed analysis of Greenland temperature records found substantial warming over the longer 1991–2019 period. When researchers examined 2001–2019, temperature trends at many stations were flat or statistically insignificant, as earlier warming was followed by cooling, during part of the later period.

The statement,  “Some Greenland locations experienced cooling during portions of the past two decades,” can be supported.

The statement, “Greenland has been cooling for 20 years,” is too broad to be supported.

Neither statement tells us whether Greenland gained or lost ice.

Temperature and ice mass are different measurements.
 

What Does the Evidence Establish?

Putting the claims side by side makes the distinction clearer.

This turned out to be one of the useful examples from my conversation with Lynne, as continuing to question the evidence didn't simply confirm her interpretation, it complicated it.

Lynne was right to ask whether the graphs and headlines we see tell the entire story. We shouldn't stop questioning once we find evidence that supports the skeptical interpretation. We should keep going.

In this case, different measurements, geographic areas, and starting dates can produce different-looking stories, without any of the underlying measurements being fabricated.

The better question isn't: Is the Arctic melting?

It's: What are we measuring, over what geographic area, over what period of time—and what conclusion does that particular measurement support?

The same approach becomes more important when we move from scientific measurements to claims about history, institutions, and motive.

During my conversation with Lynne, one of the most provocative examples involved the Club of Rome, Maurice Strong, Agenda 21, and population. Unlike an ice measurement, these claims require us to distinguish between documented connections and inferred intent.
 

The Club of Rome, Maurice Strong, Agenda 21, and Population

One of the more controversial parts of my conversation with Lynne involved the Club of Rome, Maurice Strong, Agenda 21, and population. This is the kind of subject where it is tempting to choose between two positions:

One is: It's a conspiracy. Ignore it.

The other is: Documents prove climate change was invented to control the population.

When I went back and checked history, I found that several of the individual facts Lynne raised are real and well documented. Some are more striking than  expected.

What Is Supported

The Club of Rome was founded in 1968 and was explicitly concerned with population growth, resource limits, economic growth, pollution, and other interconnected global problems.

Its famous 1972 report The Limits to Growth modeled interactions among population, industrialization, food production, pollution, and finite resources. The Club describes its founding mission as taking a global, long-term view of interconnected problems.

The passage Lynne was apparently referring to from the Club of Rome's 1991 The First Global Revolution is genuine. The authors discuss societies historically uniting around common enemies. They write that they looked for a common enemy around which humanity could unite and identified pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine, and related problems.

The next sentences, often omitted when this passage circulates online, are significant. The authors say those threats constitute a common danger and that calling them the "enemy" mistakes symptoms for causes. Their argument is that human activity is the underlying cause.

“The Club of Rome explicitly discussed global warming as something capable of functioning as a common threat around which humanity could unite,” is supported.

Elsewhere in the book, the authors describe global warming as an environmental threat and advocate reducing CO₂ emissions, increasing energy efficiency, reforestation, and alternative energy. The authors were thinking about environmental threats, not only scientifically, but in terms of their ability to organize societies around common problems.

Maurice Strong Really Was Enormously Influential

This part of Lynne's history is also substantially grounded in fact.

Maurice Strong was a Canadian businessman with extensive involvement in the energy industry and became one of the most influential figures in international environmental policy.

He served as secretary-general of the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, was the first executive director of the newly created UN Environment Programme, and later served as secretary-general of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. He held positions involving the World Bank, World Economic Forum, Brundtland Commission, and other international institutions.

Lynne isn't inventing Strong's importance. If anything, his résumé makes the story interesting.

One specific statement in the conversation might be misspoken. Lynne said Strong "set up the IPCC" and "set up the World Meteorological Organization."

Strong does not appear to have directly founded the WMO. The WMO may have come into existence in 1950, and evolved from an international meteorological organization whose history extends back into the nineteenth century. The IPCC was formally established in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and United Nations Environment Programme, not personally by Maurice Strong. Strong had played an important role in establishing UNEP and became its first executive director. UNEP later became one of the two organizations that created the IPCC.

Maurice Strong played an important role in building the international environmental institutions and conferences from which modern global climate policy emerged.

When Lynne said Strong "set up the IPCC" and "set up the World Meteorological Organization," perhaps that what she meant.
 

Agenda 21 Is Real—And Population Is in It.

Agenda 21 may not have been introduced in 1988, as Lynne suggested. It may have been adopted at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, which Strong led. And Agenda 21 does contain an entire chapter titled: “Demographic Dynamics and Sustainability.” It discusses the relationship between population growth, production, consumption, natural resources, and environmental sustainability, and recommends incorporating demographic trends into national environmental and development planning.  It even discusses assessing national population “carrying capacity.”

So if Lynne says, “Population was part of Agenda 21.”

That's true.

If she says, “Agenda 21 explicitly connects population, resource consumption and environmental sustainability,"  That's true.

The Agenda even recommends integrating population concerns into national planning.

So, “Agenda 21 was concerned with population growth and sought policies addressing demographic trends.”

Supported.

“Agenda 21 was a plan to forcibly reduce the human population.”

I don't find support for that in the document. Perhaps that's based on the assumption when considering how policies might actually be implemented and enforced to achieve the stated objectives.
 

What About Forcing People Into Cities and Making Rural Areas Off-Limits?

Lynne argued that Agenda 21 envisioned people increasingly living in cities while rural areas would become more restricted, eventually making it difficult or impossible for people to live in or enjoy some of those areas.

I looked for language in Agenda 21 that said that explicitly, to see whether Lynne's interpretation is based on what the document actually says. Passage from Chapter 7. Agenda 21 says countries should, where appropriate, concentrate on activities aimed at, “facilitating the transition from rural to urban lifestyles and settlement patterns”

That's the language in the document. 

What exactly would such a transition look like in practice?

In the same chapter, Agenda 21 discusses land use. It identifies the exploitation of marginal lands and encroachment on forests and ecologically fragile rural areas as causes of environmental degradation. It recommends inventories in which land would be classified according to its “most appropriate uses” and environmentally fragile or disaster-prone areas identified for “special protection measures.”

Chapter 10 says that a broad objective of land-use policy should be to facilitate allocation of land to uses providing the “greatest sustainable benefits.”

What do those provisions mean?

Lynne interprets them as pointing toward a future in which people are increasingly concentrated in urban areas, while greater portions of rural land are protected or restricted from the kinds of uses people previously made of them.

Someone else could read the same language and conclude that Agenda 21 is trying to manage urbanization, prevent environmentally destructive development and protect sensitive land. There is language supporting that reading too. Earlier in Chapter 7, Agenda 21 recommends reducing the effects of  “rural to urban drift by improving rural living conditions.”

After reading the document carefully, there is considerably support for the basis of Lynn's interpretation. Agenda 21 does discuss facilitating a transition from rural to urban lifestyles and settlement patterns. It  does advocate classifying land according to appropriate uses. And it does contemplate special protection for environmentally fragile areas.

None of us knows from those what the implementing those policies would be. Some protected areas could remain available for recreation, while being unavailable for residential development. Others could have greater restrictions on access or use. Rural communities could continue to exist, while new development becomes concentrated elsewhere. Different countries and governments could implement the same principles differently.

The question is, is her interpretation reasonably supported by what the document actually says?

Having read these sections, I think it is a reasonable interpretation.

It doesn't establish that the outcome she describes was the intended objective or will result. We can not fairly label her interpretation inaccurate simply because Agenda 21 describes the policies differently than she did.

We all interpret what we read. The important question is whether the evidence reasonably supports the interpretation.
 

What About Population Control?

Our discussion of Agenda 21 led to another of Lynne's arguments: that concern about population growth, and efforts to control it, was an important part of the environmental movement.

I asked her:

“Take me back in time to these people who thought we've got to save the world from overpopulation, and their thinking that we need something we can wrap the whole world around, like an issue that we can force this on. It's population control, right?”

Lynne answered, “Yes, absolutely.”

As we continued, I constructed a hypothetical scenario: 

“I'm just going to throw some stuff out there. It's just an idea. I'm trying to understand how population concerns, climate change, and the institutions we had been discussing might conceivably fit together."

Lynne said of the climate issue, “It has nothing to do with the environment. It's all they were trying to control the population.”

That's a significant claim. I went back to Agenda 21 to see what it says about population.

There's quite a lot.

Chapter 5 is titled “Demographic Dynamics and Sustainability.” It says that population growth, production and unsustainable consumption place increasing stress on the planet's resources. It calls for demographic trends to be incorporated into environmental and development policy, and says policies should address population growth while incorporating measures intended to “bring about demographic transition.”

It goes further than studying population.

Agenda 21 calls for:

• “Full integration of population concerns into national planning, policy and decision-making processes.”
• assessment of a nation's “population carrying capacity” in relation to resources including land and water;
• establishment and implementation of “national population policy goals and programes” consistent with sustainability plans;
• monitoring the integration of population policies into national development and environmental strategies; and
• implementation of population programes together with natural-resource management and development programes at the local level.

Those are the document's words and proposals, not Lynne's interpretation .

Agenda 21 tells us something important about how these population objectives should be pursued.

It repeatedly connects demographic change with poverty reduction, education, improved living standards, women's education and economic opportunities, reproductive health and responsible family planning. It says population policies should respect individual “freedom, dignity and personally held values."

That connects with something Lynne brought up next: the demographic transition.

She explained:

“Basically, what that says is that if you raise people's living standard, that the birth rate will naturally fall off by itself.”

That's important because it tells us that “population control” can describe different things.

It can mean coercively limiting reproduction; it can also describe policies intended to influence population growth, through education, economic development, reproductive health, family planning or other mechanisms that affect birth rates.

Is Lynne wrong to call that “population control”?

I don't think the evidence allows us to say that.

Agenda 21 explicitly calls for population concerns to be incorporated into national policy, for national population goals and programs to be established, for population carrying capacity to be assessed, and for policies intended to bring about demographic transition.

Where Lynne makes a larger claim perhaps, is in arguing that climate change itself was promoted as a mechanism for accomplishing that underlying population objective.

Saying, “Climate change was deliberately fabricated to impose population control, "requires evidence of intent—evidence that the people promoting the climate issue knew the underlying scientific concern was false, and deliberately used it as a pretext for accomplishing a population objective.

That doesn't make Lynne wrong about population policy being part of this history. Agenda 21 itself establishes that population and demographic change were explicitly part of the sustainability agenda.

What role, if any, did those population objectives play in shaping modern policy?
 

Intent Isn't the Only Way Interests Become Aligned

Ppolicies adopted in response to climate change affect the same things those concerned about population growth and resource consumption worry about: energy use, transportation, food production, land development, housing patterns, consumption, and the management of natural resources.

That creates aligned interests.

Someone who believes population growth or resource consumption needs to be constrained doesn't have to invent climate change, to benefit from policies intended to address it. If climate policies advance objectives someone already supports, that person now has another reason to support those policies.

We see this elsewhere.

Consider the recent interest in putting data centers in space. The idea didn't have to originate as a solution to public opposition to terrestrial data centers. Once communities began objecting to data centers because of their demands on land, electricity, and water, moving some computing infrastructure off the planet suddenly addressed problems that hadn't motivated the original idea.

A new problem can make an existing idea more attractive.

The same exist with climate policy.

An organization concerned about population growth might support a climate policy, just because it reduces resource consumption. Someone concerned about land conservation might support it because it restricts development. Someone interested in changing transportation systems might support it because it encourages public transportation or denser settlement. Someone concerned about fossil-fuel dependence might support it because it reduces oil consumption.

Those groups don't need to agree about why the policy is desirable.

Once a policy advances several interests at the same time, people and organizations with different motivations begin supporting the same movement.

That can make a movement stronger. A climate policy may no longer be supported only by people concerned about temperature. It may attract people concerned about population, conservation, urban planning, energy security, pollution, transportation, economic development, or any number of other objectives.

Over time, it becomes difficult to distinguish the problem that originally motivated a policy from all the other problems people discovered the policy could help them solve.

There is the possibility:

Climate concerns and population/resource concerns developed through separate histories. Some of their policies overlap. Once those interests aligned, people concerned about population and resource use had a reason to support climate policies regardless of what originally produced the climate movement.

It's not a question of, “Who secretly planned this?”

The systems question is:

What happens when a proposed solution begins solving problems for people other than those who originally proposed it?
 

What Does the Evidence Establish?

An Estimate Isn't the Same as a Measurement

This appears throughout science. What was measured, and what was inferred from a measurement, are not the same.

A thermometer reading at an airport is a measurement.

A reconstruction of temperature1,000 years ago based on tree growth is an inference, based on measurements and a model relating those measurements to temperature. A calculated global temperature anomaly is another level of processing.

Understanding each step matters, as each step introduces assumptions and uncertainty. The public sees the final graph.

What Happens When Different Kinds of Data Are Combined?

One of the graphs Lynne challenged was the famous "hockey stick" temperature reconstruction. Her objection wasn't that she disliked its conclusion. She questioned the way historical proxy data and modern thermometer measurements were presented together.

During our conversation, I made what I think is an important distinction: if one portion of a graph represents temperature inferred from tree rings, and another (the later half) represents actual instrumental temperature measurements, why not label them each as such? Don't simply call the entire thing "temperature." Tell us what we're looking at.

That principle extends beyond climate science. Good science should make the transformation from raw observation to final conclusion visible.

Where did the data come from? 
What was measured?
What was estimated?

What was adjusted?
What assumptions were required?
What uncertainty remains?

Climate Is a System, Not a Single Variable

Climate discussions focus heavily on CO2.

Lynne emphasized other components of the climate system, particularly water vapor and clouds. That raises a question. If temperature is affected by CO2, water vapor, clouds, solar activity, ocean circulation, land use, and many other interacting variables, how confidently can we assign the observed change to one particular factor?

That isn't an argument that CO2 doesn't matter.

It is an argument for understanding the relative contribution and interaction of variables rather than reducing a complicated system to a slogan. The more complicated a system becomes, the more careful we should be about simple causal stories.
 

History Is More Complicated Than "Scientists Discovered Climate Change"

Lynne was interested in how the modern climate movement developed—and in whether dissenting scientific views are sometimes been marginalized, distorted, or suppressed.

One example is Roger Revelle.

Revelle wasn't just another scientist with an opinion about climate. He was an oceanographer and one of the important early researchers investigating what happens to carbon dioxide released by human activity. His work in the 1950s helped establish measuring increasing atmospheric CO₂, and he played a role in the research that led to Charles David Keeling's long-running measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

He was one of Al Gore's professors at Harvard and would later become associated with the early scientific concern about human influence on climate.

That's why Lynne thought what happened later was important.

Revelle continued to express uncertainty about what could confidently be predicted from increasing atmospheric CO₂. In a 1988 letter, he cautioned against attributing that year's heat and drought to global climate change, and argued that more time was needed before making confident predictions.

Lynne believes Revelle's later caution was minimized, and that the controversy surrounding a paper bearing his name illustrates how dissenting views can be challenged or suppressed, once a scientific issue becomes politically important.

I looked into that story.

It's complicated.

It involves disagreements over Revelle's role in a paper published shortly before his death, handwritten edits, accusations about whether his views had been misrepresented, a defamation lawsuit, a formal retraction, and later disagreement about what that retraction itself established.

I don't think the surviving evidence gives us a simple story of scientific censorship. Investigating it made me wonder whether we're focusing on the wrong question. Why are we putting so much effort into determining exactly what one scientist believed?

Revelle's expertise makes his work worth examining. Suppose we could establish beyond any doubt that he later became convinced that human-generated CO₂ would not cause substantial future warming.

Would that prove anything about climate change? No.

Would that disprove it? No.

When Did the Scientist Become Science?

The attention paid to Roger Revelle reminds me of something more recent.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Anthony Fauci became one of the most recognizable scientific authorities in America. His statements were repeated constantly in the news, and disagreements with him sometimes became disagreements about “the science.”

Years later, many of Fauci's statements, recommendations, and decisions have been challenged and investigated. Some criticisms have proved misleading; other questions have been legitimate.

There's a fundamental question:

Why did so much depend on whether Anthony Fauci,  Roger Revelle, or any individual scientist, was right?

Expertise matters. Someone who has spent decades studying a subject knows things the rest of us don't. That gives us good reason to pay attention to what they say.

Expertise does not transform a person's conclusion into evidence.

Expertise gives us a reason to give someone's conclusions greater consideration. It doesn't make those conclusions immune from questioning.

A scientist can be highly qualified and be right, and they can be highly qualified and be wrong. They can change their mind, as new evidence emerges. They can be right about one part of a complicated problem, and wrong about another part.

Problems are created when journalism asks scientists to become public embodiments of science. Instead of asking “What does this scientist believe?”, they should frame asking it as:

What evidence led this scientist to this conclusion?

The 1970s Global-Cooling Story

Lynne showed examples of media coverage from the 1970s warning about global cooling and the possibility of another ice age. I remembered the message from growing up in Cleveland in the 1970s:

Scientists say the Earth is cooling, and that another ice age may be coming.

Winters were brutal. The Blizzard of 1978 brought full blizzard conditions across Ohio. In Cleveland, winds gusted to 82 miles per hour and temperatures fell to 7°F. The winter of 1977–78 was part of a cold period across much of the eastern United States.

The Washington Post ran “Colder Winters Held Dawn of New Ice Age” in 1970. Time asked “Another Ice Age?” in 1974. Newsweek published “The Cooling World” in 1975. The New York Times reported that “Major Cooling May Be Ahead” that same year.Newsweek warned of “ominous signs” of dramatic changes in Earth's weather patterns and suggested declining agricultural production could begin within a decade.

The global-cooling story was being presented to the public.

Those winters contributed to my father's decision to move our family from Cleveland to Arizona. There's some irony in that today. We moved from Cleveland to Phoenix partly because of brutally cold winters during an era when people were talking about global cooling. Decades later, Phoenix has become one of the places frequently invoked when discussing the dangers of global warming.
 

Where History Gets Interesting

Did those headlines represent the state of climate science at the time?

A 2008 paper in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society went back through the scientific literature from 1965–1979 specifically to investigate the claim that there had been a scientific consensus about global cooling. The researchers identified 7 papers predicting cooling, 44 predicting warming, and 20 that were neutral. They concluded that there was no scientific consensus during the 1970s that an imminent ice age was coming.

The scientific discussion and the message received by the public may not have been the same thing.

Some scientists were concerned about continued cooling. Others were predicting warming from increasing CO₂. What did the evidence actually establish at the time? Which scientists were right? Which ones were wrong? How did those competing scientific ideas become the much simpler stories presented to the public?
 

The Media Gets Involved

“Scientists iInvestigating Climate Change Remain Uncertain"” isn't a catchy news headline.

“Are We Headed for Another Ice Age?” is.

The historical evidence suggests that the scientific literature of the 1970s, and the public narrative about an approaching ice age were not equivalent.

Some things never change. 

How did a minority scientific concern about cooling become prominent enough in public communication that people like me remember being told an ice age was coming?

Let's compare that with today.

Today the message is different. We hear about global warming and the role of human-generated greenhouse gases. Scientific organizations, government agencies, climate assessments, newspapers, television networks, and other media regularly present human-caused warming as the prevailing scientific conclusion.

We can see from historical record that prominent media coverage didn't reflect scientific literature. That gives us a reason to ask the same question today: How closely does today's public climate narrative match what the underlying evidence actually establishes?

What the public hears about science and what the underlying scientific evidence establishes can be two different things—depending on which evidence is selected, how uncertainty is communicated, which scientists are quoted, how a headline is written, and what parts of a complicated scientific discussion are left out.
 

Then Science Entered Politics

The issue of climate change, changed considerably once it became political. Lynne discussed the highly publicized 1988 Senate hearing at which NASA scientist James Hansen testified about global warming.

Senator Tim Wirth later described deliberately scheduling the hearing during historically hot weather and opening windows the night before so the room would be uncomfortable during the hearing. Assuming that account is accurate, it doesn't tell whether Hansen's science was correct. It tells us something different.

Presentation matters.

A hot hearing room creates an experience. People weren't merely hearing about warming, they were feeling hot while hearing about it. That's persuasion.
 

What Happens When Uncertainty Meets Urgency?

Suppose the evidence indicates a potentially serious, but uncertain, risk. Should we wait, or should we act immediately to prevent what appears to be at risk?

If I believe climate change posed an existential threat, a scientist saying "We need to do more research" wouldn't make many feel safe. Some might say, "That's why we have to act now. What if we wait until we're certain and then it's too late? Why are you telling me this now, if there's nothing we can do about it? If there is, let's do it."

Lynne saw urgency as one of the mechanisms by which people are persuaded.

Urgency can be used to manipulate people. Urgency can be appropriate when the consequences of waiting are potentially catastrophic. The question is, given the uncertainty, the probability of harm, the magnitude of the potential consequences, and the costs and risks of intervention, what action is justified?

We're not arguing about belief.

We're doing risk analysis.

Something interesting happens when a complicated question of probability, uncertainty, consequences, and risk is translated into a public message.

Uncertainty can begin to look like certainty.

The Climate Clock in New York City's Union Square provides an example.

What Does the Climate Clock Mean?

Lynne began our conversation with a photograph of the Climate Clock in New York City's Union Square.

When the Climate Clock appeared in Union Square in September 2020, it displayed a little more than seven years remaining, putting the deadline around January 1, 2028.

“They say we only have like six years left,” she said, connecting the deadline.

I jokingly compared it to the New Year's Eve countdown in Times Square, describing it as showing how much time we had left to live before the end of the world.

When I tried to determine exactly what Lynne may have gotten wrong, I encountered a problem with my question:

What exactly does the Climate Clock mean?

That should have been easy to answer. It's a giant clock counting down to the second.

It wasn't.

Climate Clock's website describes the countdown in several different ways.

Its technical explanation says the clock shows how much time remains before an estimated carbon budget is exhausted. That budget is based on an IPCC estimate of how much additional carbon could be emitted beginning in 2020 while retaining a 67% chance of limiting warming to 1.5°C. The time displayed is then calculated using an assumed annual emissions rate.

Elsewhere the same organization says the clock counts down the “critical time window to reach zero emissions.” Another Climate Clock page says the deadline represents the time remaining “to prevent global warming rising above 1.5°C.” Another tells visitors, “We have six years to dramatically reduce fossil fuel emissions to stay below 1.5C degrees warming.”

These statements concern the same climate objective, the same exact clock, and they don't say the same thing.

That matters when evaluating what Lynne said.

She didn't invent the connection between the countdown and 1.5°C. The Climate Clock itself makes that connection. Her wording may not precisely describe the carbon-budget methodology. To determine that, we had to look considerably deeper than someone standing beneath a giant public clock reasonably could be expected to.

If we have to spend a significant amount of time just to determine what the clock is counting down to, how clear is the actual message being communicated to the millions who see the clock?

The Clock Isn't Measuring a Known Deadline

The number on the clock isn't a measurement in the way a thermometer measures temperature.

Climate Clock says the display is updated periodically, as data and projections change. If emissions increase, the deadline can move closer. If emissions decrease, it can move farther away. The clock isn't counting toward a known event occurring on a known date. It's converting a probabilistic climate-risk estimate into the familiar visual language of a countdown.

Climate Clock makes clear that communication and motivation are central to the project. Its mission is to “drive urgency,” mobilize people and pressure policymakers to act.

That makes the Climate Clock better understood as a fear-based motivational device built from climate projections, rather than a scientific instrument measuring the time remaining until a defined physical event.

That lea to a question I found interesting, and one that concerned me the most.
 

What Happens When the Clock Reaches Zero?

A countdown naturally creates an expectation. Something happens at zero.

What?

Climate Clock's technical explanation says that when the clock reaches zero, its estimated carbon budget will have been depleted, and the likelihood of “even more devastating global climate impacts would be very high.”

That answer is imprecise, compared with the clock displaying the deadline in seconds.

What does “even more” mean?

More than we're experiencing now?

What qualifies as “devastating”?

What probability does “very high” represent?

What actually changes, when the clock reaches zero?

Climate change doesn't begin when the clock reached the end of it's count down. According to Climate Clock, its harmful effects are already occurring. Climate risk doesn't begin either. The argument is that risk is already increasing, as emissions and warming increase.

Climate Clock answers this question in its FAQ: When the clock reaches zero, the organization says it plans a major media campaign about exceeding the 1.5°C target—and then it could move the clock to another target, such as 2°C.

The organization says the clock is not counting down to the end of the world. It says there would still be time to act after zero, although action would become more difficult, while describing the present period as a critical window for preventing climate impacts from becoming irreversible.

So we finally have an answer to the question to:

What happens when the Climate Clock reaches zero?

Not a singular catastrophe. Not the end of the world. Not a moment when climate change begins. Not a moment after which nothing can be done. Not even a moment when global temperature crosses 1.5°C.

What the clock reaches zero, according to the assumptions being used by the clock, an estimated carbon budget associated with a 67% chance of limiting warming to 1.5°C has been exhausted. Climate risks are expected to continue increasing along the continuum they were already increasing along before the clock reached zero. And if that particular target is missed, the organization says another target can follow.

Precision About Time, Ambiguity About Consequence

That leaves us with an unusual communication device. The clock demonstrate how scientific information becomes public messaging.

The Climate Clock's mission makes clear that it isn't merely trying to convey information. It is trying to produce urgency and action. A giant clock counting relentlessly toward zero, surrounded by language about deadlines, catastrophe, devastation and irreversible consequences, is designed to make the viewer believe zero matters enormously.

That's why I think “fear-based motivational device” is a useful description. It doesn't require us to claim that the people behind it are lying or that the climate science underlying their concern is false. Climate Clock openly says it is trying to create urgency, mobilize people and influence action.

Ask About Incentives—and Don't Stop There

Climate policy moves enormous amounts of capital. The money involves research funding. renewable energy, carbon markets, electric vehicles, government subsidies, technology development, political campaigns, and international programs.

Financial incentives are relevant. If someone's career, company, political influence, or research funding benefits from a particular conclusion, we should at least be aware of it.

Fossil-fuel companies have incentives too, as do renewable-energy companies. Politicians have incentives.  Researchers and environmental organizations have monetary incentives. So do Media organizations.

What If the Solution Causes More Harm Than the Problem?

Lynne raised an issue that I think deserves consideration regardless of where you stand. She pointed to economist William Nordhaus and the idea of applying cost-benefit analysis to climate policy. The basic question is:

Before undertaking a large-scale intervention, shouldn't we ask whether its expected benefits exceed its expected costs?

He is not arguing, “We don't know enough, so don't take action.” He accepts human-caused warming as a significant problem and argues for reducing emissions. His contribution is asking how much mitigation is economically justified, rather than assuming that the maximum technically achievable reduction is automatically the best policy.

His basic framework:

Compare the damage caused by additional warming with the cost and consequences of preventing that warming.

Imagine three possibilities. Doing nothing has costs from climate damages. Eliminating emissions extremely rapidly has costs because energy, transportation, industry, infrastructure, etc. must change. Somewhere between is an economically preferable trajectory, where the additional cost of preventing another increment of warming is balanced against the additional damage that warming would cause.

That's what his DICE model tries to estimate by linking the economy, emissions, atmospheric concentrations, climate, damages, and mitigation costs.

Nordhaus's cost-benefit modeling historically did not support the politically chosen temperature targets. In his 2018 Nobel lecture, his DICE model's cost-benefit optimum allowed temperatures to rise to more than 3°C above preindustrial levels by 2100, whereas international policy was targeting 2°C and aspiring to 1.5°C.

He wrote that 1.5°C was essentially infeasible in that model and that achieving 2°C required substantially more aggressive mitigation than his standard cost-benefit optimum.

Nordhaus wasn't asking, “How do we stop climate change at any cost?”

He was asking, “How much climate change should we prevent when we consider both the damages from warming and the costs of preventing it?”

Nordhaus's preferred policy mechanism has generally been a price on carbon: if emitting CO₂ imposes costs on others, make those costs part of the economic decision.

That creates an incentive to reduce emissions while allowing households and businesses to determine where reductions make economic sense. He advocated investment in low-carbon technologies and international cooperation to discourage countries from benefiting from emissions reductions made elsewhere.

The important idea is that identifying a problem, and evaluating a solution, are different exercises.

A Light Bulb Changed How I Thought About Solutions

I've encountered a smaller version of this problem in my own work.

I've been an environmentalist for most of my life. Long before climate change became a political issue, I drove a small four-cylinder car because using less gasoline and producing less pollution seemed like the responsible thing to do.

When environmental organizations began encouraging people to replace incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent lamps—the curly CFL bulbs—I supported the idea: Use less electricity. Reduce pollution. Help the environment.

It seemed obvious.

My indoor environmental work caused me to look at the problem from a different direction. CFL bulbs contain mercury. Someone asked me what happens if one breaks inside a home.

I didn't know.

I started looking into it.

Research, including work conducted for the State of Maine, had examined mercury concentrations following CFL breakage.

Suddenly I was looking at a proposed environmental solution from the other side. The bulb might reduce electricity consumption and therefore reduce emissions associated with producing electricity. It also introduced mercury into millions of homes.

Discovering a risk from the solution doesn't tell us that the original environmental problem wasn't real. It means the analysis wasn't finished. Before recommending people change out their incandescent bulks and install CFLs, they should have considered: How much mercury exposure occurs in a home, office, or school, when (not if)  a bulb breaks? Are there safer alternatives capable of producing the same energy savings?

When all of those are considered together, does the solution produce more benefit than harm?

That's a different analysis from:

CFLs use less electricity, therefore CFLs are good for the environment.

I contacted the Sierra Club.  I was a paying member. My question was, where is the evidence that we've evaluated the solution?

They replied that they considered the amount of mercury emitted from coal power plants to be greater than that used to make the bulbs. They were not able to provide me with actual data showing that, nor had they considered the human health effects due to mercury exposure when breaking a bulb or throwing a used one in the trash instead of taking it to a special disposal facility that accepts used bulbs. I subsequently canceled my membership, not because of the CFL issue, rather I lost faith in how much they consider the entire system when proposing solutions to problems.

The CFL example is tiny compared with restructuring an energy system. The principle scales.

Doing something isn't the same as solving the problem.

Before adopting a solution, we should ask:

What will it cost?
How much warming is it expected to prevent? Over what period?
What other environmental effects might it create?
What happens to energy prices and reliability?
Who receives the benefits and who bears the costs?
Could the same resources produce greater benefits through a different intervention?

Most importantly:

What happens if our assumptions are wrong?

None of this uncertainty is an argument for doing nothing. If the potential consequences are enormous, acting before we have certainty may be rational.

A bad solution doesn't prove the original problem isn't real, and the reverse is equally important:

A real problem doesn't make every proposed solution a good one.

What If We're Solving the Wrong Problem?

Imagine we conclude that reducing emissions is worthwhile.

That still doesn't tell us which policy to choose. Should we build more solar? More wind? More nuclear? Improve transmission? Develop better storage? Reduce consumption? Improve efficiency? Invest in entirely new energy technologies? Adapt infrastructure to changing conditions?

Each option has costs, benefits, risks, environmental consequences, and second-order effects. During our conversation I found myself rejecting the forced choice between existing technologies.

Why must the answer be coal or solar? Oil or wind?

Perhaps the better solution hasn't been developed. That is what engineering is supposed to do. Don't choose among the solutions sitting on the table. Ask whether the table contains the right and best solution.

When Does Skepticism Become "Misinformation"?

A major theme in our conversation was about what happens to dissenting views. Lynne believes climate skeptics have been censored and marginalized. She pointed to controversies involving scientists who challenged prominent climate conclusions and argued that their reputations were attacked, rather than their arguments fairly considered.

The underlying issue is worth examining. What should happen when a scientist challenges a widely accepted conclusion?

If the evidence is poor, challenge the evidence.
If the methodology is flawed, demonstrate the flaw.
If the interpretation is wrong, explain why.

Calling someone a "denier" tells us nothing about whether the argument is correct. Labeling someone a "censored scientist" doesn't make an argument correct. The claim should have to survive on its evidence.

Search Results Aren't Evidence of Censorship

There was a moment in the conversation that illustrates why alternative explanations matter. Lynne argued that Google suppresses minority climate viewpoints because searches tend to return conventional interpretations first.

I offered another possibility.

Search engines and AI systems reflect what is most prevalent, authoritative, linked, or statistically common in their underlying information environment. If 95 sources repeat one interpretation, and five present another, the majority interpretation appearing first doesn't require someone deliberately hiding the other five. It may simply be an emergent property of how the information system ranks content.

Instead of asking:

How are they censoring this?

ask:

What mechanisms could produce what I'm observing?

Deliberate censorship is one hypothesis. Ranking algorithms are another. Institutional consensus is another. Source-quality criteria are another. Only after identifying alternatives can we begin determining which explanation best fits the evidence.

The Biggest Risk Is Certainty

The conventional story can become too simple:

Scientists have settled the question, so stop asking.

The skeptical story can become equally simple:

Scientists were wrong, politicians made money, therefore climate change is a hoax.

Neither is good.

A proposed environmental solution can cause substantial harm, without disproving the environmental problem it was intended to solve. Holding several of those possibilities at once is harder than choosing a side, and is closer to how complex problems work.

What You Can Do

You don't have to be a climate scientist to think carefully about the topic of climate change.Start by changing the questions. When you see a graph, ask: What was actually measured?

When you see a historical reconstruction, ask: Which portions are measurements and which are estimates or proxies?

When you hear a precise number, ask:

How was it calculated? Can I see the data for myself or am I looking at someone's interpretation of it?

When someone presents a cause, ask: What other variables could produce the same observation?

When a model makes a prediction, save the prediction and compare it with what happens later.

When someone proposes a solution, ask about its entire lifecycle and consider any unintended consequences.

Whether you believe human-caused climate change represents an existential threat, think its effects have been exaggerated, reject much of the conventional explanation, or simply haven't decided, the same principle applies:

Don't begin by asking which side you're on.

Beging by asking what the evidence establishes, can I see the raw data for myself, and what assumptions were required to get from the evidence to the conclusion.

Editor's Note: This article grew out of my conversation with Lynne Balzer, who has spent more than a decade researching climate change and has written books challenging the conventional climate narrative. The episode intentionally explored controversial and minority viewpoints. Claims and hypotheses discussed or explored, are presented here as subjects for examination, not facts.

This article is based on my podcast conversation with Lynne Balzer. The ideas discussed here originated in that conversation, while the structure, emphasis, and commentary are my own. Any errors or interpretations are mine, not Lynne Balzer's.
 

Listen or Watch

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Books by Lynne Balzer

Exposing the Great Climate Change Lie
https://www.amazon.com/Exposing-Great-Climate-Change-Lie/dp/1733460322

The Green New Deal and Climate Change: What You Need to Know
https://www.amazon.com/Green-New-Deal-Climate-Change/dp/1733460306
 

About the Author

Daniel Stih (danielstih.com) is an aerospace engineer, software engineer, indoor environmental consultant, and author of 12 books. For more than 30 years, he has investigated complex problems spanning engineering, technology, the built environment, and human decision-making. His work explores how evidence, assumptions, and systems shape the conclusions we draw—and whether we're solving the right problem. Learn more about his approach in Why I Think This Way.
 

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