The Patriot Post® · Climate Gloom Dispelled by Light and Truth

By Vijay Jayaraj

A lie does not always arrive wearing a mask. It can enter public life as a selective statistic, a dramatic graph, or a forecast presented with more certainty than the evidence allows. It can sit beside a true statement until the whole package feels unquestionable. 

For Christians, that should produce neither panic nor tribal loyalty. Scripture gives us a stricter duty: “Test everything. Hold fast what is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21). That command matters in the climate debate. For decades, the climate movement has asked the public to blindly accept a simple narrative: humanity faces an imminent planetary breakdown, fossil energy is the central culprit, and drastic restrictions on affordable energy are the only moral response.

Yet, if one looks carefully at the data as the Scriptures command, the visible record of human welfare tells a different story. The era of modern energy did not produce a dying civilization. It enabled longer, healthier, safer, and more productive lives. Global life expectancy rose from about 32 years in 1900 to 73 years in 2023, an achievement tied to energy proliferation, sanitation, medicine, transport, refrigeration, reliable power, mechanized agriculture, and economic development — all of which were driven primarily by energy from fossil fuels.

Satellites show a greener Earth, not a browner one. And that greening was positively influenced by increased carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere and the increasing temperatures, the very two factors we are being asked to consider as evil.

The most revealing development in the climate debate may not be a new temperature measurement. It is the quiet retreat from one of the assumptions that shaped decades of climate research and policy.

The Worst Case Was Retired. The Rules Built on It Were Not.

RCP8.5 and its successor, SSP5-8.5 (speculative greenhouse gas emission pathways built into computer climate models), became the preferred backdrop for alarming claims about heat, sea-level rise, crop losses, storms, migration, infrastructure risk, and economic damage.

Now the scientific machinery behind future climate scenarios has moved away from that framing. The new CMIP7 scenario framework (often acting as the scientific rudder for policy makers) no longer includes RCP8.5, SSP5-8.5, or SSP3-7.0 in its core set. Its authors state that the former high-emissions projections are “implausible.”

Washington has begun the correction. The U.S. Global Change Research Program has published an amendment retiring the Fifth National Climate Assessment, the congressionally mandated 2023 report built on worst-case inputs, and agencies are being told to stop treating projections that rest on those inputs as guidance. That report drove regulatory analysis, grant money, grid planning, zoning, and sea wall budgets. Every one of those decisions deserves a fresh audit.

The National Academy of Sciences pulled its climate science chapter from the reference manual used by federal judges while an independent review examines how the chapter was produced. Judges had been handed contested attribution methods as established fact in litigation seeking billions from energy producers.

The Money Left the Room

The unraveling has not remained within government reports and modeling committees. For years, corporations joined climate alliances, announced net-zero commitments, and promised investors that fossil fuels would rapidly give way to a new energy system. Now, the reckoning is occurring in boardrooms.

Larry Fink, who runs the world’s largest asset manager, now talks about energy pragmatism and says he is echoing clients rather than campaigners. BlackRock had already dropped the weaponized ESG label and walked out of the Net Zero Asset Managers group.

On October 3, 2025, the UN-convened Net-Zero Banking Alliance voted itself out of existence after its members walked. At its peak the alliance counted close to 150 banks. Wall Street left, Canada’s big six left, HSBC and Barclays followed, and what remains is a set of documents binding nobody.

Producers moved too. Shell, Aker BP and Enbridge quit the advisory group drafting the Science Based Targets initiative’s oil and gas standard once they saw a draft that would have barred new fields. The initiative paused the work and the deadline slid out to 2030. 

For a Christian, this is welcome news. The ninth commandment forbids bearing false witness, and a false witness against God’s created order remains a false witness. So, remember that you are not obliged to be gullible. Test the claims. Trace the funding. Ask what a forecast assumed before you let a nation be rearranged around it. 

The world does not need another generation trained to fear energy, resent development, and distrust human progress. It needs citizens who can distinguish observation from projection, science from activism, stewardship from control, and compassion from coercion. 

The climate panic was built by blending partial truths with dramatic assumptions, then presenting the result as unquestionable fact. Its most extreme scenarios are now being abandoned by the very systems that elevated them. 

Vijay Jayaraj is Research Associate for Developing Countries with the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, a Science and Research Associate at the CO₂ Coalition, and a Visiting Fellow at the U.S. National Center for Energy Analytics. He holds a M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia, postgraduate degree in Energy management from Robert Gordon University and has served as a research assistant at the University of British Columbia’s Fisheries Center in Canada.