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Over the last 40 years, climate science has transformed from a method for navigating uncertainty to a teleological campaign against doubt.

In the conventional understanding, climate change is uncertain. We don’t know how much carbon the human race will ultimately pump into the atmosphere; we don’t know, precisely, how much warming any eventual atmospheric concentration will cause; we don’t know how much this warming will affect sea levels or weather patterns; and we don’t know how well future societies will adapt.

These uncertainties are all the scientific justification we should need to to reduce emissions, invest in more resilient infrastructure, and protect natural systems. We don’t know exactly how dangerous three or four degrees of global warming will be by the end of the century, but we don’t need to know in order to act. There’s a reason that William Nordhaus, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on climate economics, titled his book The Climate Casino: the risk is enough for us to hedge our bets.

More recently, though, this foundational idea of the modern environmental movement has itself been cast as a form of climate denial. In their landmark polemic Merchants of Doubt, the historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway executed an ambitious reframing of the science of climate change, alleging that the central obstacle to climate stabilization was campaigns financed by the fossil fuel industries, which used PR tactics to artificially inflate the true uncertainty in scientific climate change data. Scientists and advocates created new scientific bases for climate action, such as the 350 Parts Per Million standard and two-degree temperature targets. Climate impacts were no longer seen as the consequence of centuries of industrialization but rather the criminal fault of a few polluting industries. And climate change, under the new science, is not a future risk but a present catastrophe. Nordhaus, the father of the carbon tax, now regularly comes under fire for his perceived lack of climate ambition (his work has purportedly enabled climate change denial and delay.)

In place of uncertain outcomes, this new generation of climate advocates offered the certainty of present events. Doing so has entailed significant exaggeration beyond the hard facts of climate science, including the overhyping of climate change’s contribution to present-day extreme weather events and the use of implausible warming scenarios that forecast dire future impacts. This transformation has had the intended effect of narrowing the solution set understood as climate action. Climate change under the new regime is not an emergent long-term risk to be managed by smart planning, expanding technological capabilities, and deepening societal resilience. Instead, it is an immediate physical threat, earning illicit perpetrators — so-called fossil capital and the ever-growing army of climate deniers — an increase in climate-related litigation and regulation.

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Climate targets, single-event attribution analysis, and other forms of science activism have completely changed the way researchers, advocates, and journalists talk about the problem of climate change. The United Nations and hundreds of governments have endorsed atmospheric temperature targets. Friederieke Otto was recently named a contributing lead author on the IPCC’s upcoming Seventh Assessment Report. And the camp of climate deniers, a term once reserved for those who, through ignorance or malice, rejected the mainstream science of the greenhouse effect, has come to describe opponents of the Green New Deal and advocates of nuclear energy, which climate activists claim is too speculative for the certain policy prescriptions made by climate science.

But while activists may have taken over climate science, their big-picture results are not flattering. The vast bulk of the global energy supply still runs on fossil fuels. Carbon emissions continue to rise. The Trump Administration is systematically dismantling the climate policy apparatus that has been built up over the last generation, and it is not alone — governments around the world are rolling back climate commitments. There’s little uproar, because climate change remains a low priority for the public. And trust in climate scientists, and in science itself, shows signs of decline. . . .

. . . Reconstituting climate science and policy will require contending with this fractious new informational and political gestalt. For a newly successful climate science to take root in the coming years and decades, we need a renaissance in uncertainty. Uncertainty is not a dirty word — in climate science or anywhere else. Indeed, it is better understood as a kind of epistemic bravery: an assertion that while scientists and policymakers can’t predict the future, a scientifically informed, democratic public is capable of navigating it.

— Alex Trembath, Merchants of Certainty
Asterisk 13: Science (Winter 2026)