Back in 2022, I advanced what was, at the time, a rather unfashionable prediction.
The great climate panic, I argued, had reached its high-water mark.
Not that it would disappear overnight. Quite the opposite. Movements of this size never collapse with the theatrical elegance of a stage curtain falling. They linger. They mutate. They become increasingly defensive. But they do stop growing.
Everything I have watched over the past four years has only reinforced that impression.
2022 increasingly looks like the year the tide began to turn.
It was around then that climate realism first started edging into respectable conversation. Organisations that had previously treated any dissent as heresy began cautiously acknowledging that some claims had been exaggerated, that some predictions had proved unreliable, and that the political and economic costs of certain policies deserved open discussion.
Ideas that once carried a professional price tag slowly became discussable.
That is always the first crack.
When an orthodoxy no longer demands unanimous obedience, its monopoly is already weakening.
Life has become marginally easier for those who questioned the prevailing narrative years ago.
Marginally.
Enormous deceptions—or enormous collective mistakes, if one prefers the kinder description—rarely vanish quietly into the night. Too many careers depend on them. Too many institutions have reorganised themselves around them. Too many fortunes have been built upon assumptions that were never seriously tested in the marketplace.
An entire ecosystem has grown around climate alarmism.
Consultancies.
Departments.
Non-governmental organisations.
Research programmes.
Subsidy schemes.
Political careers.
Corporate marketing campaigns.
Whole industries have learned to feed from a stream of public money that, under ordinary market conditions, might never have existed.
That ecosystem will not surrender voluntarily.
It cannot.
Its survival depends upon preserving the sense of permanent emergency.
That is why reaching the peak is not the end of the story.
It is merely the beginning of a very long descent.
Bubbles do not simply pop.
Most slowly deflate.
Sometimes over decades.
The pressure eases gradually while those inside insist nothing has changed. Every setback is declared temporary. Every criticism is dismissed as dangerous. Every failure becomes evidence that even more commitment is required.
The psychology is remarkably consistent.
The more a movement feels its influence slipping away, the more radical its remaining believers often become.
Moderates quietly drift elsewhere.
The true believers tighten their grip.
The rhetoric becomes harsher.
Compromise becomes betrayal.
Reality itself becomes increasingly unwelcome.
Ironically, this usually accelerates the decline.
Nothing destroys public confidence faster than a movement abandoning persuasion in favour of moral intimidation. Once ordinary people begin feeling bullied rather than convinced, the emotional spell weakens. The bubble continues losing air even as its loudest defenders insist it has never been stronger.
History has seen this pattern before.
The rise takes decades.
The decline takes decades as well.
Institutions built over generations are not dismantled by a single election, a single report or a single embarrassing prediction. They decay slowly, one assumption at a time, until eventually the world simply moves on while the old machinery continues operating long after its authority has evaporated.
That is where I believe we are now.
Past the peak.
Now comes the long deflation.
It will be noisy.
It will be expensive.
And the beast, wounded though it may be, still has teeth.
Wounded animals often bite the hardest.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2026/06/23/wikipedias-founder-gets-the-wikipedia-treatment/