Ted Nordhaus’s Epiphany
2 days ago Charles Rotter
Ted Nordhaus deserves a nod for doing what few in the climate establishment ever do: admitting he was wrong. In his essay “I Thought Climate Change Would End the World. I Was Wrong” (The Free Press, Oct. 19, 2025), Nordhaus concedes that his worldview “was built on apocalyptic models sprung from faulty assumptions”. That sentence alone marks a watershed moment in the long, strange saga of climate alarmism. It’s rare to see one of the movement’s own architects confess that its foundations were exaggerated, its projections implausible, and its tone hysterical.
Nordhaus co-founded the Breakthrough Institute, an organization that has long tried to make climate activism sound reasonable by marrying environmental rhetoric to talk of innovation and modernization. For years, he and his colleagues accepted the central dogma—that the planet faced an existential crisis unless humanity swiftly abandoned fossil fuels. They were not content to question the science; they amplified it. “The heating of the earth,” Nordhaus once wrote in 2007, “will cause the sea levels to rise and the Amazon to collapse and… trigger a series of wars over basic resources like food and water”.
Now, almost two decades later, he confesses that such scenarios were never plausible. The old models assumed “high population growth, high economic growth, and slow technological change”—a trifecta of contradictions that cannot coexist. He points out that fertility rates are falling, economies are decarbonizing on their own, and technological progress accelerates efficiency regardless of political slogans. His admission is blunt: “I no longer believe this hyperbole.”
That’s refreshing honesty.
More remarkable still is Nordhaus’s acknowledgment that the so-called “worst-case” scenarios—those beloved by headline writers and politicians—have been quietly revised downward. “Most estimates of worst-case warming by the end of the century now suggest three degrees or less,” he writes, yet “the reaction among much of the climate science and advocacy community has not been to become less catastrophic”. Instead, the doomsday clock has simply been reset. The goalposts move, but the panic remains.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/10/23/ted-nordhauss-epiphany/
