As we’ve noted, the whole climate scare seems to be unraveling despite various intellectual rearguard actions. For instance Heatmap frets that “The New York Times reported this weekend, for instance, that the online real estate marketplace Zillow has removed climate risk scores from “more than one million home sale listings,” following complaints from real estate agents.” It then quoted a scholar known to think climate change is causing huge damage to homes today, “They’re doing people a disservice”. Whereupon Heatmap went conspiratorial with “the private sector has its own reasons not to be completely fulsome with climate-related risk data.” Without first checking the meaning of “fulsome”. But the private sector lives or dies by the accuracy of its risk assessment, completely unlike government. So they can’t just keep saying that house will burst into flames as the tornado deposits it in the floodwaters if it ain’t so. To them, at least, it matters whether such claims are wrong.

The actual Times story, to its credit, admitted that there was some well-meaning jiggery-pokery behind the burning flooded planet in your basement story. But only after several rearguard actions:

“Zillow, the country’s largest real estate listings site, has quietly removed a feature that showed the risks from extreme weather for more than one million home sale listings on its site. The website began publishing climate risk ratings last year using data from the risk-modeling company First Street. The scores aimed to quantify each home’s risk from floods, wildfires, wind, extreme heat and poor air quality. But real estate agents complained they hurt sales.”

So we have surreptitious conduct to make money in sleazy ways. Or do we? The article immediately continued:

“Some homeowners protested the scores and found there was no way to challenge the ratings.”

As for instance with facts? Sadly, yes:

“Fires, floods and other disasters are posing more risks to homes as the planet warms, but forecasting exactly which houses are most vulnerable – and might sell for less – has proved fraught. First Street models have shown that millions more properties are at risk of flooding than government estimates suggest.”

Fraught, you say. Is that a word here meaning “wildly inaccurate”? After all the U.S. government may currently be headed by Donald J. Trump, but the vast federal bureaucracy contains a great many climate alarmists hired under Joe Biden and even Barack Obama. And First Street’s figures being far more scary even than theirs might just possibly indicate a thumb on the scales. As the Times went on:

“The California Regional Multiple Listing Service has asked the other large real estate listing platforms to remove certain details about flood risks from their listings. ‘When we saw entire neighborhoods with a 50 percent probability of the home flooding this year and a 99 percent probability of the home flooding in the next five years, especially in areas that haven’t flooded in the last 40 to 50 years, we grew very suspicious,’ Mr. [CRMLS CEO Art ] Carter said.”

Understandably. So apparently did customers, forcing Zillow to go where activists scorn to tread.