Among his first second term executive actions, U.S. President Donald J.Trump withdrew the U.S. from global agreements promulgated by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) including a "precautionary principle" urging proactive "better safe than sorry" reductions in fossil fueled CO2 emissions to prevent dire climate change, regardless of scientific uncertainties related to actual emergencies, measurable benefits, or collateral mitigation costs, and risks.
That UNFCCC policy established at the Rio Earth Summit in May 1992 shifted the burden of proof to requiring fossil fuel proponents to defend alleged harm rather than to those claiming to champion public interests including reduction of extreme weather and sea level rise.
But, who is genuinely looking out for our best interests?
In the late 1980s, a global warming scare was based upon theoretical and primitive climate models predicting man-made carbon emissions were causing unprecedented and dangerous "anthropogenic" (man-made) climate change.
The central UNFCCC strategy to fight that climate change was brilliant . . . to put a value credit on cutbacks in the amounts of carbon dioxide emitted by fossil-burning industries and then let other industries that produced amounts of CO2 emissions in excess of their allocations purchase credits from them.
In other words, they would create a trading market to buy and sell air.
As Al Gore's former U.S. Senate pal, Timothy Wirth, D-Colo., observed, representing the U.S. as Clinton-Gore administration's undersecretary of state for global affairs at the U.N.'s 1992 Summit, "We have got to ride the global warming issue . . . Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy."
Recall the significance of that timing, having occurred following the end of World War II in 1945 when global temperatures had cooled over three decades despite massive amounts of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere by war industries.
By the late 1970s many leading scientific organizations and news networks had breathlessly predicted arrival of the next Ice Age.
Nevertheless, although the term "climate" is typically associated with annual average temperature records measured over at least three decades, within about a decade of slight warming the U.N. had already attributed a "climate crisis" to human-caused fossil-fuel carbon emissions and had organized an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to convene a continuing series of international conferences aimed at hyping scientifically unsupportable threat scenarios.
Even the IPCC admits its highly theoretical and predominately failed climate models can't be trusted for global predictions, admitting in its 2001 report, "In climate research and modeling, we should realize that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible."
For example, 96% of their models between 1998 and 2014 predicted too much warming, compared with a mere 2.4% that undershot temperatures.
But after all, what if those overheated models were correct?
Since climate is almost always changing – either becoming warmer or cooler – what's so bad about the former?
Remember being warned that melting of Antarctica and Greenland icecaps would cause disastrous U.S. coastal flooding?
According to a study published in the Journal of Marine Science and Engineering conducted by Dutch researchers Hessel Voortman and Rob de Vos of 200 different tide-gauge stations with at least 60 years of historical data, the world's ocean levels aren't really changing much: only about six inches per century.
Voortman told independent journalist Michael Shellenberger that this rise was found to be far less than often reported by climate scientists and the media.
Additionally, once small fluctuations are considered, there is no detectable acceleration.
Noting that the IPCC models "significantly overestimate local sea level rise in 2020," the researchers observed that most regions of notable increase were located near others that showed negligible changes in recent decades, "making it unlikely that a global phenomenon like CO2-driven global warming is the cause."
Voortman and de Vos concluded that most sea level fluctuations can be attributed to local factors such as earthquakes, extensive construction, or post-glacial effects.
And weren’t we also told that dreaded global warming caused by greedy oil companies and revenue-obsessed internal combustion engine producing automotive producers had led to an increase in the frequency and severity of extreme weather?
Consider that the recent 2025 Atlantic hurricane season ended without a single one making landfall in the continental U.S., the quietist year since 2015, with an average of around two annually.
A clearer scientific picture of seasonal hurricane occurrences applies accumulated cyclone energy, or "ACE," statistics that integrate the number, strength and duration of all tropical storms, with lower seasonal ACE ratings reflecting less damage potential.
Although the North Atlantic saw roughly a 9% higher ACE last year than the 1991-2021 average, overall, all other Northern Hemisphere ocean basins — the Northeast Pacific, Northwest Pacific and North Indian — have clocked an overall ACE 19% below that year-to-date normal.
Meanwhile, perhaps contemplate why not to prefer global warming to cooling, given that far more people die from hypothermia than from overheating.
Think about it.
What's so bad about having longer growing seasons for leavy plants that love CO2 in exchange for oxygen?
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022). Read more Larry Bell Insider articles — Click Here Now.