We want to share with you the news, h/t The Free Beacon, that another significant alarmist has gone over to the let’s-not-panic side. It’s not quite on the level of Bill Gates, let alone Al Gore if he ever does. But Michael Grunwald of the Washington Post is now grumping that “[S]ome climate activists have an annoying habit of exaggerating how badly things are going.” Yes they do. And since Grunwald is the chap who wrote a book called We Are Eating the Earth, he knows whereof he speaks. The Beacon also notes Grunwald wrote an “entire book praising Vice President Joe Biden for his ‘clean-energy transition’ leadership of President Obama’s $800 billion in stimulus spending”. So he’s been there and done that. Now he seems to be back. Not perhaps yet all the way, but we climate skeptics aren’t in the business of enforcing rigid dogma.

Indeed we shouldn’t be too harsh. If there’s a characteristically human statement we have all sometimes felt, it’s “I’m a fool!” So soon old, so late smart and all that. Plus in addition to being deeply convinced of the power of repentance and forgiveness, from a practical point of view we want to make it easier not harder for people to admit error and continue to contribute. Not that it could ever happen to us, you understand. But still.

Beacon author Ira Stoll quotes Grunwald’s piece in Liberties:

“Global warming is making droughts and floods worse, but it is not making them happen. In fact, global warming does not always make everything worse; tropical hurricanes, for example, do not seem to be getting more frequent, defying a lot of shrill eco-catastrophism. Apocalyptic rhetoric about how it’s game over for the climate if we do not cut greenhouse emissions 43% by 2030 is not only annoying but wrong. There’s no such thing as game over for the climate. … there is no inflection point where we all suddenly die or are all doomed. There is only better and worse.”

As regular readers will know, we do not believe that droughts and floods are getting worse which means it cannot be true that “global warming” is making them worse… or that anything else is. But we heartily agree that “global warming does not always make everything worse”. What’s next? Will he admit it makes some things better?

In theory you’d think so. It would be awfully difficult for anything whatsoever to have only bad consequences, even something evil in intention and diabolical in execution. World War II had significant upsides, which doesn’t mean we’re in favour. But in fact his article doesn’t contain a single example of something warming, or climate change, has made better. Which is weak-minded. Even if warmth is 98% bad and cold 98% good, there must be something in that other two percent. So are we blasting him with faint praise?

A bit. But mostly no because of that business about:

“There’s no such thing as game over for the climate. … there is no inflection point where we all suddenly die or are all doomed. There is only better and worse.”

As C.S. Lewis once said, atheists must be very careful what books they read. And climate alarmists must be very careful what thoughts they think because ideas have consequences, and big ideas have big consequences, both for our conduct and for our other ideas. The brain is not a cafeteria where you can simply pick some of this and some of that as suits your current tastes. It’s a dynamic logic factory where one thing leads to another.

Including noticing that a lot of the people you keep company with are babbling nits. As for instance when he writes:

“Climate issues are more complicated than the nose-ringed Just Stop Oil pests who glue themselves to museums or the contemptuous Bluesky in-crowd that snarks about insufficiently radical Democrats would have you believe. The climate left is often clueless about politics, and sometimes also about climate; the knee-jerk naysayers who fight zero-emissions nuclear plants, solar panels in tortoise habitats, and the transmission lines necessary to distribute renewable power to metropolitan areas are not doing the environment any favors.”

But also, and crucially, the recognition that to speak of tipping points, especially over and over, is to betray a radical failure to understand nature and even reality itself with its complex metaphysical structure including the complex web of costs and benefits to any course of action rather than an omnicause view that all good things come bundled together without effort, and only those with evil motives oppose you.

Despite which there is much to take issue with, even dislike, in his piece, and believe us we will. But first we applaud his dismissal of pests who advance a cause in order to annoy people rather than annoying people to advance a cause. (They are not entirely confined to the left but do seem more common there.) And also, which is where he’s on a slippery slope and we hope he keeps going, his indignation at people who don’t recognize tradeoffs.

We do not applaud the way the article starts by rubbishing Donald Trump and goes on at great length, perhaps in part to establish the author’s bona fides among progressives before telling them something they don’t want to hear. Or perhaps he really thinks Trump is a babbling nit on climate, given the stuff he’s said that Grunwald quotes and we would not begin to attempt to defend. Though Grunwald also says things, like “The earth has not heated this quickly in 485 million years” that cannot be defended either so beware of the glass house issue. It’s bad enough that he cannot possibly know how quickly the Earth has heated over a century or more at every single point in, say, the Cretaceous, and worse that he does not know about the Younger Dryas.

We’d even take issue with his fact-checking Trump on German electricity generation, writing “wind is Germany’s largest source of electricity” when in fact the government’s forcing of utilities to turn to it first cannot mask the reality that it’s coal and natural gas, both as a primary source and as crucial backup, that keep the lights on especially during Dunkelflauten. Not grasping how governments distort markets and create illusions is a strange attribute in a veteran journalist.

Speaking of which, we laughed out loud when after chastising people for refusing to pursue practical politics he wrote:

“It turns out that there is one foolproof strategy to ensure better climate policies. This ‘one weird trick,’ as the climate writer David Roberts calls it, does not involve throwing soup at famous paintings, or talking about the climate in ways that emphasize hope or fear or relatable storytelling, or talking about the climate at all. It is not about mobilizing climate voters, or building bridges to climate skeptics, or persuading ordinary Americans that climate change is already affecting their lives right now. The one weird trick is to elect Democrats. I recognize that this is an awkward point for a nonpartisan journalist to make, but it’s simply a fact that Democrats almost always try to enact policies that help the climate, while Republicans almost always try to block and reverse them.”

A non-partisan journalist? Who just happens to think Democrats are right about everything and Republicans a bunch of deplorable morons? As Robbie Burns wrote:

“O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us/ To see oursels as ithers see us!/ It wad frae mony a blunder free us,/ An’ foolish notion:/ What airs in dress an’ gait wad lea’e us,/ An’ ev’n devotion!”

Even more to the point, what policies by Democrats have really worked? Indeed, Climate Home News is currently incensed that:

“elected Democrats seem to have embraced this message of ‘climate hushing,’ with mentions of climate change plummeting since 2025. They’ve pivoted to a focus on energy affordability in the wake of President Donald Trump’s decision to attack Iran—and the resulting surge in oil prices.”

So the party he endorses appears to be full of ineffectual cowards on the issue he values most. But again let us not be too unkind.

He has seen something important, namely that far too many climate activists are loudmouthed and mean-spirited ignoramuses, and that we need to understand that we live in a world of tradeoffs. And he has said it out loud. And one thing has a remarkable tendency to lead to another once you awaken from your dogmatic slumber.

His journey is far from over. But at least he’s on it.