From Watts Up With That?

By Anthony Watts

Michael Barone’s “We Have Reached the Emily Litella Moment on Climate Change” published at Rasmussen Reports, reads like confirmation of something many of us have been documenting for years: the climate catastrophe narrative is not collapsing because of denial or politics, but because it has finally run out of evidentiary runway. Barone gives this reckoning a memorable cultural hook, likening today’s retreat from apocalyptic certainty to Emily Litella’s sheepish “Never mind” — the moment when an overheated argument quietly dissolves under the weight of reality.

What makes Barone’s column especially notable is that it arrives amid a broader fracture in the climate narrative — a fracture I recently described as “The Week Climate Catastrophism Lost its Grip.” In just a few days, voices once considered untouchable within polite discourse began conceding what skeptics have long argued: that claims of imminent collapse were never as solid as advertised.

Barone points to this shift by highlighting figures such as Bill Gates and Ted Nordhaus, both now openly acknowledging that climate change is not an existential threat. Gates’ admission that climate change “will not lead to humanity’s demise” is particularly telling, not because it is radical, but because it is mundane — an implicit walk-back from decades of rhetoric that framed warming as a civilizational endgame.

That same recalibration was on vivid display when Nordhaus himself wrote, “I no longer believe this hyperbole,” repudiating the catastrophic projections he once helped popularize. Barone treats this not as an isolated conversion, but as evidence that the underlying models and assumptions simply failed to deliver their promised disasters. From a WUWT perspective, this is the predictable outcome of overconfident modeling, exaggerated feedbacks, and a refusal to reconcile forecasts with observed data.

What Barone captures particularly well — and what aligns closely with my own op-ed — is how gatekeeping has shaped the debate. For years, dissent was caricatured as ignorance, even as emeritus scientists like Richard Lindzen and William Happer were sidelined despite decades of experience in atmospheric physics. When those same scientists explain, calmly and publicly, that climate sensitivity is uncertain and extreme-weather trends remain unalarming, the spell breaks. The problem for the catastrophists is scale: the old filters no longer work.

Barone also nails the quasi-religious tone that climate advocacy has adopted. Rituals of atonement, moral absolutism, and hostility toward heresy have replaced empirical skepticism. At WUWT, we’ve long argued that once science becomes a belief system, it stops correcting itself. Barone’s comparison of climate activism to secular religion is not hyperbole — it is an observation borne out by how critics are treated and how failed predictions are quietly memory-holed.

Perhaps the most important overlap between Barone’s essay and my own analysis is the emphasis on adaptation and resilience. Nordhaus’ acknowledgment that climate-related mortality has plummeted despite modest warming reinforces a point that catastrophism cannot explain away: human prosperity, technology, and infrastructure matter far more than model-driven temperature scenarios. As Barone suggests, the public has begun to notice that the promised disasters never quite arrive — and that each new “crisis” sounds suspiciously like the last.

In that sense, the Emily Litella moment isn’t a sudden revelation; it’s a slow recognition that the emperor has been without clothes for some time. The climate movement didn’t gain certainty — it gained better marketing. Now, as insiders quietly say “never mind,” the narrative loses its authority.

Barone’s column is valuable not because it breaks new scientific ground, but because it signals a cultural shift. When mainstream commentators begin conceding what skeptical scientists and analysts have argued all along — that uncertainty is real, impacts are overstated, and catastrophe was oversold — the debate finally moves out of fear and back toward evidence.

If there is a genuine tipping point here, it isn’t measured in degrees Celsius. It’s measured in how willing people are to question claims that demand obedience but deliver exaggeration. On that front, Barone’s essay is less a eulogy than a marker — a sign that the long-delayed “never mind” has finally arrived.