Recent removal of the U. S. “endangerment finding” does not change the laws of physics. As I wrote before, “In politics belief is reality. In physics belief is irrelevant. The global climate only responds to actions.”
Climate politics has long been an easy target for criticism, as I imagine will be the case for many years. George Orwell, in his novel 1984, wrote about a similar insanity he termed doublethink, which he defined in his book as “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” As an example, he wrote, “It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grams a week. And only yesterday […] it had been announced that the ration was to be reduced to twenty grams a week [from thirty].”
Similarly, in Hans Christian Andersen’s 1837 fairy tale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” a politically naive child says there is no special fabric because the parading king is naked. It’s obvious to everyone seriously looking, but, as Antigone said in Sophocles’ famous play bearing her name, “there is no gag like terror, is there gentlemen?”
The field of psychology complements my literature references. Two fine examples are the “dangerous conformity” experiment regarding social terror led by Professor Dominic Abrams of the University of Kent, and the 1951 “Asch Conformity Experiment.” I posted YouTubes about these September 6, 2018 at “Mass Hypnosis of United States’ Policy Regarding Climate Change.”
Bill McKibben’s February 16, 2026 Substack post “An El Niño is brewing” at The Crucial Years shows “America’s abandonment of the ‘endangerment finding’ undergirding national climate policy is not the most important thing that happened last week” because of “the news that we’re likely to see another El Niño soon; take this as your first warning that not only the temperature but the politics of the planet are likely to change dramatically, and soon.”
I also apprecaited Nick Breeze’s YouTube “We Might Go Beyond 3°C [ . . . . ]” in which he said at 28:05 on the timeline,”I don’t think [our civilzation] can really survive [ . . . ] over 2 to 2.5 [degrees C above 1850 preindustrial baseline].”
I mentioned before I like what Oregon poet William Stafford wrote in 1982 in his poem “Reading the Big Weather,” “This earth we are riding keeps trying to tell us / something with its continuous scripture of leaves.”