As the retreat from climate alarmism threatens to become a rout, some are repeating the classic advice Senator George Aiken of Vermont did not actually give on the Vietnam War in 1966: “Let’s declare victory and get out.” Most notably the New York Times “Climate Forward” which had the gall to email a link to this chart as “some of our best climate reporting from the week.”

We’d hate to see the worst of it, given their chronic drumbeat of we’re-missing-the-targets-we’re-all-going-to-die reporting to this point. And how the current pathway slopes downward despite being… um… a temperature increase of 2.5C to 2.9C, surely leading to catastrophe since 1.5C was the redline blah blah blah. And especially that it’s all purely hypothetical since actual emissions are rising rather than fitting their new improved curve. But their read on that chart is “Slower emissions growth means the arc of temperature increase has curved downward over the past 10 years” and it’s “a significant improvement from where we were 10 years ago: In 2015, scientific models said we were on track to increase the global average temperature by up to 3.8 degrees Celsius.” So now scientific models say something else because they were told to, and all we need to do is fiddle yet more parameters and have graphics do their thing, as with those old Pentagon “body counts”, and we’re outta here. Real world? What real world?

Oh, heh heh, that real world. Statista notes that:

“Global greenhouse gas emissions reached a new record high in 2024, after increasing by around 3 percent compared to 2023 and 8 percent compared to the previous decade (2010-2019 average). This is according to data from the UNEP’s Emissions Gap Report 2025, issued on Tuesday ahead of the COP30 climate conference in Brazil.”

Not really a downward curve as the dictionary defines that term. But again, it’s about changing the models and calling it a policy triumph.

Actually the Times thing is even weirder than it looks, because their second item in that roundup shrieks:

“We started burning coal, oil and gas on a large scale roughly 150 years ago. As a result, global temperatures have been rising ever since, and the last 10 years have been the hottest 10 on record. The most scorching was 2024.”

Also, not to demand consistency or anything, back in 2023 Times columnist Brad Plumer wrote, characteristically, that the 1.5C rise “above preindustrial levels” was critically crucial:

“That number holds a special significance in global climate politics: Under the 2015 Paris climate agreement, virtually every nation agreed to ‘pursue efforts’ to hold global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Beyond that point, scientists say, the impacts of catastrophic heat waves, flooding, drought, crop failures and species extinction become significantly harder for humanity to handle.”

Now they’re turning 2.5 or more into a soothing downward slope and scientists say “meh” or something.

Meanwhile Heatmap declares lack of defeat “In the Long Run, Trump Might Not Mean Much for the Climate’s Trajectory/ A new report from the Rhodium Group finds that the range of likely temperature outcomes has essentially not changed since 2023.” Again, we question the grasp of scale of anyone who expects “the range of likely temperature outcomes” to alter dramatically in two years no matter what some politician does, and the grasp of computer science of anyone who thinks this “range of likely temperature outcomes” is anything but a modeling artefact. But it is weird the way many alarmists are going heck no, of course there’s no crisis, we stopped it by claiming one was coming then changing our story.

As that item says, completely missing the point:

“A full decade has passed since the landmark Paris Agreement on climate change, and in that time the world has avoided the most catastrophic scientific projections.”

No. Not remotely. At least in that “the world” has done all the stuff the projections said we must not do or we’d all burn up crackle crackle, and it didn’t happen because the projections were wrong so “the world”, also known as people like the Rhodium Group, have changed the projections and called it changing the outcome.