There’s a famous line about the French Revolution, not from Edmund Burke or Thomas Carlyle, that “like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children”. (It’s actually from the moderate Calvinist Jacques Mallet du Pan.) And it has happened many times since Robespierre himself was guillotined, as radicals too readily identify sinister enemies everywhere, but especially within their own ranks. Now that the inherently impossible 1.5°C warming target looks set to be breached in the near future the true climate zealots are already identifying the counterrevolutionary traitors to be dealt with in the coming reign of terror: climate scientists themselves for failing to be sufficiently hysterical. Including, of all people, Zeke Hausfather.

Hausfather recently Xed out indignantly that “Blaming climate scientists for the world overshooting 1.5C is deeply silly. We are not the ones who set us up for failure with unrealistic targets here.” He was objecting to an item in The Conversation, a site devoted to one-sided monologues on climate, that went into high dudgeon over the fact that “Nearly all modelled pathways for limiting global heating to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels involved temporarily transgressing this target.” But here’s the thing: the scientists who pointed this out were simply being reasonable by recognizing that no practical plan existed for reducing human GHG emissions below what the computers said would take the planet over that level at least briefly. What one might call an inconvenient truth if in a snide frame of mind. And now the activists who insist on following the science are furious with scientists for doing science.

As the Conversation rant said of the notion that advancing technology would make carbon capture feasible at some point: “If reversal cannot be guaranteed, then clearly it is irresponsible to sanction a supposedly temporary overshoot of the Paris targets. And yet this is exactly what scientists have done. What compelled them to go down this dangerous route?” Hausfather is understandably bewildered as well as indignant at suddenly being cast into obscure darkness on climate. But there’s a very real sense in which it serves him and his associates right because they have encouraged, or at least failed vocally to contest, this kind of utopian paranoid thinking about climate and now it has come back to bite them.

For instance, the Conversation indictment includes that:

“When overshoot scenarios were summoned into being in the early 2000s, the single most important reason was economics. Rapid, near-term emissions cuts were deemed prohibitively costly and so unpalatable. Cost optimisation mandated that they be pushed into the future to the extent possible.”

Boo economics. See it’s all just a plot to undermine the revolution:

“By conjuring up the fantasy of overshoot-and-return, scientists invented a mechanism for delaying climate action and unwittingly lent credibility to those (and they are many) who have no real interest in reining in emissions here and now; who will seize on any excuse to keep the oil and gas and coal flowing just a little longer.”

The rhetoric is paranoid, almost conspiratorial. And anyone who’s been blatting on about “deniers” in those kind of terms should not be astonished to find themselves riding a tumbril sputtering that they’ve got the wrong guy.

The Conversation authors have firm views on science including that “Once 1.5°C lies behind us, we must consider that threshold permanently broken.” And perhaps it is uncharitable to observe that they are an “Associate Professor of Political Ecology” and an “associate professor of human ecology” whose work centres more on asserting such things than demonstrating them empirically or theoretically. But it is directly relevant to ask how many scientists of Hausfather’s general disposition have made any real effort to dispel wild talk of tipping points, runaway greenhouse effects and other such pseudoscientific rants. As Roger Pielke Jr. pointedly responded to Hausfather’s lament about the wrong people being shipped to the scaffold:

“Climate scientists are surprised to find that after years of promoting extreme climate scenarios they’ve become villains among the apocalypse crowd who think 1.5C is the end of times”.

Indeed, when Hausfather attempt to redirect the inquisitors to “the ones who set us up for failure with unrealistic targets here” who does he mean? Not outfits like CDN, or indeed ExxonMobil. Climate-alarmist politicians? COP participants? Other alarmist scientists? And what would have been realistic targets for rapidly and decisively making the world a cooler place with better weather?

Meanwhile for the apocalyptic crowd the Revolution charges on, sweeping aside the Whiteguard insects and whoever else doesn’t keep up with the current mania:

“There then remains only one road to ambitious mitigation of climate change, and no amount of carbon dioxide removal can absolve us of its inconvenient political implications. Avoiding climate breakdown demands that we bury the fantasy of overshoot-and-return and with it another illusion as well: that the Paris targets can be met without uprooting the status-quo. One limit after the other will be broken unless we manage to strand fossil fuel assets and curtail opportunities for continuing to profit from oil and gas and coal. We will not mitigate climate change without confronting and defeating fossil fuel interests. We should expect climate scientists to be candid about this.”

And by “candid” they mean hew to the party line or be cast as an enemy of the people with all that implies. If Hausfather now finds that he’s been keeping dubious company, well, we’ve been trying to tell him so. But better late than never.

Come join the side that does real science. There’s plenty of room, and we have snacks.