Of course they now insist that the quiet burial of the RCP8.5 scenario changes absolutely nothing.
Of course they demand we accelerate the very policies already hollowing out industries, wrecking affordability, suffocating competitiveness, and slowly grinding the productive classes into exhausted compliance.
Because movements built on emotion rarely reverse course when reality refuses to cooperate.
They double down.
That is what belief systems do.
And yes, I use the word belief system deliberately.
Because there comes a point where a person ceases to interpret evidence and instead interprets reality itself through emotional commitment.
Facts become secondary.
Narrative comes first.
Identity comes first.
Moral vanity comes first.
And once someone has fused their personal virtue to a particular worldview, changing that worldview becomes psychologically catastrophic.
This is why idiots cannot be persuaded merely by presenting facts.
You could drown them in evidence for a year straight and it would barely scratch the paintwork.
Not because facts do not exist.
But because their mental operating system was never constructed around facts in the first place.
It was constructed around feelings.
Around emotional impressions frozen into certainty.
At some point in time, a sensation became a conviction.
A moral intuition became an objective truth.
A fashionable panic became an unquestionable reality.
And from there the structure hardens like concrete.
Because actually investigating things properly is difficult.
Real research is exhausting.
Connecting dots honestly requires effort, patience, self-doubt, intellectual humility, and worst of all the willingness to discover that one’s previous conclusions were wrong.
Most people would rather wrestle a rabid boar than submit themselves voluntarily to that process.
Especially educated people.
Especially status-conscious people.
Especially those whose social standing depends on appearing permanently correct.
The modern intellectual class is absolutely addicted to the appearance of certainty.
Not truth.
Certainty.
Those are very different things.
Truth requires constant revision.
Certainty merely requires confidence.
And confidence is cheap.
One can manufacture it by the truckload.
Now imagine what happens psychologically when someone finally notices that one of their sacred truths may have been fundamentally flawed from the beginning.
Not slightly exaggerated.
Not somewhat overstated.
But wrong in its core assumptions.
That realization is not a small correction.
It is a demolition charge.
Because if one emotional truth collapses, others suddenly become suspect as well.
And that is the terror hiding underneath all ideological rigidity.
The fear of cascade failure.
If this was wrong…
what else is wrong?
How many convictions were inherited socially rather than reasoned independently?
How many opinions were adopted because they granted acceptance inside the tribe?
How much of the moral architecture inside one’s head survives direct contact with reality?
That possibility terrifies people far more than climate catastrophe ever could.
Because admitting error does not merely require intellectual honesty.
It requires ego death.
And ego death is something very few modern people can tolerate.
Especially those who spent years lecturing others from positions of moral superiority.
Imagine the humiliation.
After branding skeptics as deniers, heretics, anti-science barbarians, enemies of the planet, servants of apocalypse and all the other hysterical labels fashionable over the past decades, one suddenly has to admit:
Perhaps the models were exaggerated.
Perhaps the certainty was theatrical.
Perhaps the panic became self-sustaining.
Perhaps assumptions were sold as settled truth.
That is psychologically unbearable for many.
So they choose a far easier path.
Reality itself must be wrong.
Economic destruction must intensify.
Human sacrifice to the narrative must continue.
The policy failed? Then the policy was not radical enough.
The predictions failed? Then the public did not obey sufficiently.
The costs exploded? Then society must simply endure more pain.
This is not scientific reasoning anymore.
It is theological reasoning.
The doctrine cannot fail.
Only the unbelievers can fail.
And thus entire societies continue marching deeper into policies that increasingly resemble acts of ritual self-harm performed for moral absolution.
Factories close.
Energy prices rise.
Industries flee.
Birth rates collapse.
Infrastructure decays.
Living standards erode.
And still the priesthood insists the cure is more purification.
More sacrifice.
More obedience.
Reality be damned.
Human flourishing be damned.
Economic survival be damned.
The narrative must survive at all costs because for many people the narrative is no longer merely an opinion.
It has become identity itself.
And people will destroy astonishing amounts of the real world before surrendering an identity built on emotional certainty.