Only last week we reported on Bill Gates changing his mind and declaring that the world has bigger problems to worry about than climate change. Then this week we received one of those tiresome “experts available” emails from the University of Ottawa, aimed at media wanting a talking head to dial up on the news of the day, which led off with Dr. Ian D. Clark, professor emeritus of Earth and Environmental Sciences declaring “Our environment has much more serious challenges than our CO2 emissions, which are blamed without scientific merit, for many environmental events.” Under, admittedly, an image of someone holding a burning globe. But since these missives are clickbait, it’s clear that the mood has changed. You can now say, indeed lead with, there not being an existential climate crisis.

Reality hasn’t yet fully penetrated academia so that email also offered us plenty of alarmism. But even there it often had this unaccustomed flavour of promoting adaptation rather than focusing solely on emission reductions:

“COP30 could finally bring structure and momentum to climate adaptation, with the potential adoption of 100 adaptation metrics set to guide progress and direct resources where they’re needed most.”

There’s that adaptation again. Of course it’s not coincidence that it also offered us someone in the “Faculty of Education & Institute of the Environment,” superficially a curious combination, who:

“focuses on environmental education and the socio-scientific dimensions of the Anthropocene, using community-based learning to foster climate awareness and action. ‘Unfortunately, since the first COP in 1995, very little seems to have ben [sic] accomplished in concrete terms: Climate Change continues to be increasingly present in our lives.’”

So much so that it’s now a proper name, apparently. Or maybe it’s just that faculties of education long ago gave up worrying about syntax. But again, there’s a recognition that what they’ve been doing has not worked and that things are changing.

Even many of the deluded are drifting back with the tide, as they drifted out with it. Thus on the day New Yorkers elected the egregious Zohran Mamdani as their mayor, the New York Times “Climate Forward” gushed:

“Though none of the three major candidates has emphasized climate change on the campaign trail, avoiding the matter once in office is not an option. As John Surico and Nick Underwood reported last month on the growing risks of floods in the city: ‘New York’s adaptation is a matter of survival.’ The winner of Tuesday’s race will be tasked with navigating – and paying for – immediate climate risks like flooding and extreme heat, as well as following through on plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions, all while keeping costs low. It’s a tall order.”

Gosh. Ya think? But note that the focus of this fatuity is again “adaptation” lest New York not survive, rather than prevention lest it not survive. (It will either way, of course.)

Likewise, a piece in the Canadian publication Hill Times, which seeks to market itself with the promise “become a political insider”, a pitch we find as revealing as it is unappealing, starts:

“As the world grapples with the overlapping crises of climate change and food insecurity, there is a unique opportunity to take a Canada-led approach by supporting and scaling transformative adaptation in African farming systems.”

Very little in that trendy sentence should be taken seriously, from the crisis of “food insecurity” in a world that has never been more populous or better-fed (in our youth the issue was “hunger” or even “famine”) to that crisis being linked to a climate one to a glittering we’ll-be-rich-and-beloved Canadian-led transformation of African agriculture. But it is, again, part of the herd of independent minds stampeding from prevention to adaptation in which even some politicians are tiptoeing away from their own capitulation to the once-mighty green mob.

Not everyone’s on board. Including, in that U of O press release, the “Adjunct Professor, Interdisciplinary Health Sciences” whose take on climate:

“focuses on analyzing how the linkages between family planning, population growth, and environmental sustainability are perceived and could be harnessed to strengthen reproductive rights and improve environmental sustainability.”

And of course the hat is out, with another expert opining that:

“Although global solutions for the climate change crisis are not yet broadly available, multidisciplinary research into Climate Change and its potential solutions will continue to generate value across multiple sectors of science, industry and society.”

Send more grants. To help us adapt to the collapse of alarmism.