No, really. We say so, being tired of unfounded hysteria about trends in weather, preposterous claims of measuring temperature globally to two decimal places even today let alone long ago, and absurd hype about a “green energy transition” that is transitioning us to brownout bankruptcy. But Climate Home News also says so, emailing that “we recently asked you what the top climate themes of 2025 would be. You told us you wanted to see more ambition on cutting emissions, adapting to climate change and protecting nature.” So more of the same, including hopeless vagueness. But they went on “And you’d like more honesty and straight-talking and less jargon, misinformation and accounting tricks when it comes to climate policy and action.” Good idea. Even if, and we want to make this absolutely clear, it means admitting things aren’t working, can’t work or don’t even make sense.

There’s something laughable about “more ambition on cutting emissions”. Have we not seen massive ambition, year after year, COP after COP, only to find that as Thomas Sowell warned such people in vain decades ago “Reality is tricky”? What we need is more performance and less “ambition” in the sense of substituting lofty goals for practical steps.

As for “adapting to climate change”, what a brilliantly original idea. If only our ancestors had thought of it when the last glaciation ended and they could have taken off the mammoth skins and headed into newly available hunting grounds and pastures in… oh. They did. And people have been adapting to climate change, née weather, since the invention of the hut. But carry on.

As to “protecting nature”, we are non-sarcastically in total agreement here. So let’s obsess less about “carbon pollution” that promotes plant growth and thus through the miraculous cycle of life feeds herbivores who feed carnivores and everyone bursts into song. OK, skip the song. But seriously, let’s put some of the time, effort, vast sums of money governments are flinging at “climate change” and also the idealism into things like protecting habitats. In short, let’s take the monomania out of environmentalism.

Now for the easy hard part. More honesty and straight-talking. Less jargon shouldn’t be too hard. But leveling with people about what works and what doesn’t would be a great idea. (For instance, the Manhattan Contrarian recently took a look at New York state’s sprint to beat Germany to hit the “green energy wall” with real data about the performance of alterative energy.) As would an end to misinformation, for instance about a definitive trend in increasing bad weather. All that stuff should be fairly easy in a technical sense, if hard morally.

The bit about accounting tricks is hard in both senses. Once you start facing the genuine difficulties in measuring things like carbon offsets you may end up realizing that reality is very tricky in places and that econometrics won’t save the day. And worse, that the scale of these things, in principle and especially in practice, is dramatically insufficient for existing ambitions let alone the bold new ones to, oh, say, suck enough carbon out of the air to bring back the glaciers.

To be fair, there is a surly branch of alarmism that insists that nothing is being done due to some capitalist denier plot to destroy the only planet they have to live on. But most climate worrywarts have been far too chipper about how easy it would be totally to redesign our economies and societies even while far too panicky about the fact that there’s weather. And if Climate Home News is serious about that ambition, they’re going to have to face the fact that while things are much better than they think on the science front, they’re hideously worse on the policy front.

Oh, that chirpy email began by saying “One of the things 2024 will be remembered for is (almost certainly) being the first year that’s more than 1.5C hotter than pre-industrial times” which constitutes reporting data that doesn’t even exist yet. Then it praised “World Weather Attribution” and said their cofounder felt that “The top resolution for 2025 must be transitioning away from fossil fuels” which is agonizingly trite. And then it ended “We promise to keep wiping away the greenwash in 2025 - Happy New Year!”

Sadly, it won’t be a happy new year if they commendably stick to the pledge to be honest including that if you wipe away the greenwash, corporations will flee from your economy-destroying agenda and you’ll realize you have no workable plan and never did. If so you must talk straight about it. Or at least you should, and we will.

Happy New Year!