The Perpetual Climate Panic Machine Has Collapsed!

Tim Graham on Jan 16, 2026

Global warming has gone cold as an issue. Despite decades of panicked predictions of doom, it's never been a high priority for voters, and Trump's bold expressions of "climate denial" went unpunished by voters.

The media still sound allied with the Green New Deal pushers, but the thrill is gone. Last November, leftists blasted ABC, CBS and NBC for barely touching the COP30 global climate summit in Brazil. (PBS gave it nearly 16 minutes, and 10 of it was a John Kerry softball interview.)

Now Axios.com posted an analysis by Amy Harder on this trend, titled "The world's great climate collapse." Greenpeace gang, beware: "The last year has seen an epic reversal that spread quickly from governments to boardrooms to pop culture."

Not only has Trump dismissed climate panic, but Harder noted Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney, "once one of the world's most vocal climate advocates," is now repealing some of his country's climate policies. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair also issued a memo questioning the wisdom of pursuing "net zero" emissions policies.

Then there's billionaire Bill Gates, an unelected global leader. He circulated a memo criticizing the climate movement while shifting much of his money and focus back to public health -- just four years after publishing the book "How to Avoid a Climate Disaster," a bestseller that drew gushy reviews from AP, CNN, USA Today and Oprah Daily magazine.

With Trump in office, Ford pulled back sharply from its electric-vehicle plans, shifting focus to more popular and profitable hybrids and gas vehicles due to slowing EV demand. Europe scaled back its plan to ban gasoline-powered cars in the next decade and softened climate disclosure rules, which The New York Times captured with a dejected headline: "Europe Begins to Tiptoe Away From Key Climate Policies."

The Axios analysis claimed even Hollywood is tiptoeing away, "swapping climate angst ... for oil swagger, as seen in the current hit TV show 'Landman.'"

That's not entirely true. In December, the CBS drama "Fire Country" featured a firefighter lecturing like Al Gore: "We all know damn well there is no fire season anymore. Thanks to climate change, it's all year round. Just keeps getting worse," and concluding, "We're at war."

Also in December, "Daily Show" star Jon Stewart brought on New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert to uncork the usual panic. Manhattan used to be an ice sheet like Greenland, she said. Stewart then quipped, "See, what I hear from that story is, if we keep this up, we could turn Greenland into Manhattan." Kolbert jumped on the panic button: "That is absolutely true. Keep it up, but there's 20 feet of sea level rising. So Manhattan will not be here."

This is not a new shtick. In 2008, ABC News showed a picture of New York City vanishing underwater in its prediction of what will happen by 2015. Ooooops. Never forget that in 1989, leftist scientist Paul Ehrlich narrated a segment on NBC's "Today" show predicting that global warming would trigger a flood to completely cover Washington, D.C., which obviously never happened.

After eco-leftists predicted certain climate-change doom by 1995, or by 2000, or by 2015, and now we're still doom-less in 2026, the public should be skeptical that they're the most credible experts on predicting what the future holds.

If the perpetual climate panic machine has collapsed, it's because the facts never lined up to prove any reason to panic. Their authoritarian "solutions" -- banning everything from gas-powered cars to gas stoves and grills -- needed the fuel of panic to be forced on the public. The bloom is off their poisoned rose.

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Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.