Updates On The Collapse Of The Climate Scam

On April 14 I recorded a podcast with Tom Nelson. He has since posted a slightly edited version on his YouTube site. Go to this link if you would like to watch it — about an hour long. The main subject is the sordid history of EPA’s Endangerment Finding and efforts of people including myself to get it rescinded.

The good news on the Endangerment Finding front is that EPA under new Administrator Lee Zeldin is very much on the job of eliminating the EF. Of course, once it has been rescinded it will face a blizzard of legal challenges. I hope and expect that Zeldin and his team are up to the job of carrying out a rescission that will stick. I offered my suggestions for how to do a rescission that will stand up to challenge in this post from January 26.

Separately, Nelson has made a thing out of compiling a growing list of “Signs That The Climate Scam Is Collapsing.” That list is now up to some 33 items and counting. The current version can be found here. Readers of this blog are likely already familiar with many of the items on Tom’s list. However, today I would like to feature a couple of items from Tom’s list that are important but may be less well known.

Item 3 on Tom’s list is that the funding of something called “NASA GISS” is likely to be terminated as part of the DOGE cost-cutting efforts. GISS is the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. For some unknown reason, GISS is part of NASA, and is located, of all place, in Manhattan, in an office building on upper Broadway near Columbia University. GISS is mainly known for producing a world temperature time series known as GISTEMP, which is systematically massaged and altered in ways to enhance the narrative of climate alarm. For more details than you will ever want to know about the data tampering, go to my 30+ part series “The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time.”

Tom calls NASA GISS a “climate alarm shop,” which is accurate. For many years it was headed by crazed alarmist James Hansen, until his retirement in 2013. Since then the head has been Gavin Schmidt, who has proved to be Hansen’s equal in spreading alarm. GISS is best known for its regular press releases proclaiming the most recent month or year to be the “warmest ever.” Indeed, GISS’s most recent press release, from January 10, has the headline “2024 Was the Warmest Year on Record.” Since January 20 GISS has not issued any further press releases, which hopefully represents some message control getting exerted by the Trump administration.

Following Nelson’s links, it is not clear to me that the information about the impending defunding of GISS is completely definitive. One link goes to this Wall Street Journal piece from March 29, with the following quote:

It is at NASA, though, where Musk is making the biggest shift in an agency’s priorities to align them with his own—both financially and personally.  He is working to recast its programs, reallocate federal spending and install loyalists to aid his decadeslong goal of sending people to Mars.

If true, that would certainly be bad news for GISS; but the WSJ does not mention GISS specifically,. Then there is this piece by Larry Bell at Newsman today, which uses the WSJ piece to reach the conclusion that GISS is necessarily on the chopping block. From Newsmax:

[As] to NASA GISS, it’s difficult to imagine that any of the three dedicated space exploration action figures [Trump, Musk and new NASA Administrator Jared Isaacson] will wish to continue to divert any more of the agency’s annual $25 billion budget to support climate alarmism by an ugly poster child for DOGE waste spending reform.

So on this item Nelson may be getting a little ahead of himself, but there is certainly a good basis to hope.

Item 9 on Nelson’s list is the final demise of one of the longest-running climate litigations, the one known as Juliana v. United States. This is the case that I have sometimes referred to as the “stupidest litigation in the country.” I have had many posts on it over the years, most recently on April 9, 2024.

The Juliana case was brought way back in 2012 in the federal District of Oregon. The plaintiffs asserted a “constitutional right” to a clean and healthy environment, and sought as a remedy that the court impose a plan to “phase out” all use of fossil fuels. My April 9, 2024 piece included a fairly lengthy summary of the proceedings to that time, which had included three visits to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. After the Ninth Circuit had found a lack of standing for the plaintiffs in a 2020 decision, it had remanded the case back to the District Court with instructions to dismiss; but the District Court instead had given the plaintiffs another chance to amend the complaint to get around the problems. And then the District Court was starting to get the case ready for trial. So after four more years of getting jerked around in the District Court, the government was back in the Ninth Circuit with a mandamus petition when I wrote that post a year ago.

The latest news is that the Ninth Circuit granted the mandamus petition, and now, finally, the Supreme Court has denied a petition for certiorari from the plaintiffs. From Reuters, March 24, 2025:

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected a bid by 21 young people to revive a novel lawsuit claiming the U.S. government's energy policies violate their rights to be protected from climate change. The justices denied a request by the youth activists to hear their appeal of a decision by the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals directing a federal judge in Oregon to dismiss the case after holding they lacked legal standing to sue.

So this one case is definitively over. The bad news is that there are many other similar and/or copycat cases out there kicking around in the courts. It will be a long time before they are all killed off, but at least this one is a start.

Check out Tom’s list for plenty more examples of the continuing, if painfully slow, demise of the climate scam.