Irrational Fear

Over the past few years, this space has become something far more meaningful than I ever expected when I first started writing. When I began Irrational Fear, I was coming out of a difficult place professionally. I had spent years in academia, built a career as a scientist, and then found myself increasingly at odds with the direction things were going… not just in terms of conclusions, but in how science itself was being communicated and discussed.

There is a point where science stops asking questions and starts issuing commands. We are there. A Canadian startup now claims it can suppress lightning to prevent wildfires. The logic is simple and increasingly familiar. Lightning ignites fires. Fires release carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide contributes to climate change. Therefore, lightning itself has become a problem to solve. But that conclusion only makes sense if you accept a much deeper assumption. That natural systems are errors.

Before getting into the data, I want to briefly share something with you. There are important developments unfolding on my end regarding future roles where I will be directly involved in helping reshape how climate science is interpreted and communicated at a national level. These processes take time and, as many of you know, institutional change moves slowly, but meaningful progress is being made. Because of this, the pace of my writing may slow somewhat in the near future.

The recent escalation of conflict involving Iran has triggered a familiar media cycle. Analysts warn that disruptions in the Persian Gulf could send oil prices soaring. Headlines speculate about tanker routes through the Strait of Hormuz, global supply shocks, and the economic consequences of geopolitical instability in the Middle East. But almost immediately, another narrative appears.

Over the past several weeks a new wave of climate headlines has appeared claiming that global warming is accelerating. News outlets around the world have reported that recent temperature records indicate the planet is heating faster than scientists previously believed. These stories all trace back to a new paper published in Geophysical Research Letters which claims that global warming has accelerated significantly during the past decade.

Over the past week, headlines have warned that the EPA has “weakened” mercury protections and that Americans will now be exposed to dangerous levels of toxic pollution.

Over the past month, I have done something increasingly rare in public climate discourse. I stepped away from headlines, institutional summaries, and model visualizations and went back to the primary literature itself… ice cores, speleothems, marine sediments, isotope datasets, proxy methodology papers, and modern synthesis studies spanning multiple regions of the planet. This was not a casual review.

For more than a decade, climate policy has rested on a simple and powerful premise. Rising greenhouse gases increase radiative forcing, trap more heat, and therefore drive modern warming. From this premise flows everything from emissions caps to net-zero mandates. The logic appears straightforward. Control CO₂ and you control the climate. But the Earth does not respond to narratives. It responds to energy. That distinction is not philosophical. It is physical.

The 2009 Endangerment Finding treated carbon dioxide as a pollutant that threatens public health and welfare. For more than a decade, that designation has functioned as the legal foundation for regulating fossil fuels, electricity generation, transportation, and much of the modern economy. Now that the Finding is being reconsidered, it is worth stepping back from the regulatory framework and asking a much more basic scientific question. What is the correct atmospheric concentration of CO2?

For years on Irrational Fear, I have written about Dansgaard–Oeschger (D–O) events, abrupt climate shifts during the last glacial period when temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere surged by double-digit degrees in mere decades.