This Halloween season, there is a scary atmosphere across college campuses, as revealed by former Vice President Kamala Harris during a recent interview. According to Ms. Harris, her goddaughter, a junior in college, is experiencing climate anxiety, as are her fellow students.
The angst is not surprising. For decades, the narrative of impending global climate catastrophe has trudged ahead nearly unimpeded through academia. Politicians and professional societies joined the steady march along the way. Mainstream media dutifully disseminated the descending doom.
Yet now a broader, less frightening view of the climate is emerging with a perspective that challenges the climate story status quo. More of the public is learning that the claimed and predicted global climate calamities are considerably overblown.
The overestimation is because a large part of the disaster saga can be found in the way the story is told.
The climate narrative is built on a concept called modeling. Climate modeling is typically based on math involving sophisticated equations that necessitate assumptions and limitations and include measured and approximated input quantities.
Most of my 40 years of professional practice involved mathematical modeling of the dispersion of air pollutants. The air pollution models combined sources of contaminants (industrial smokestacks) with adverse weather conditions (stagnant air) and critical receptors (vulnerable communities) to produce a reasonable estimate of worst-case air pollution impacts.
This sort of modeling focused on predicting harmful effects over relatively short time frames (hours to one year) and on tight space scales (dozens of square yards to a few square miles).
Compare this example of small-scale weather simulation with its large-scale global climate analog.
Both modeling methods attempt to faithfully replicate reality. As understanding of the atmosphere increased and computer capacity expanded, both methods yielded dramatically improved outcomes. Both rely on careful, unbiased observations and interpretations of adequate scientific data. Both produce useful results to guide decisions involving public health and safety. These are some of the positive portions of modeling.
There are some negative parts.
Models typically lack adequate 3D space resolution to capture small but potentially critical aspects of the atmosphere. Within a large volume of air, constant changes occur with temperature, moisture, wind, pressure and energy.
Lack of complete information and knowledge of the chemistry and physics of the air leads to serious uncertainties about future conditions. This is true for small-scale air-pollution modeling and even more so for global climate modeling. The atmosphere is inherently complex, as is its modeling, and the increase in time and distance affects forecast accuracy.
The mismatch between model output and reality is recognized in “A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate,” a July 2025 Department of Energy report. Although the document is facing challenges, its section on the “Vertical temperature profile mismatch” notes that “the atmosphere’s temperature profile is a case where [climate] models are not merely uncertain but also show a common warming bias relative to observations. This suggests that they misrepresent certain fundamental feedback processes.”My peer-reviewed research, which included 30 years (1991 to 2020) of low-level temperature conditions derived from southwest Pennsylvania twice-daily balloon launch data, confirms that changes in the lowest layer of the Earth’s air defy incontrovertible conclusions.
Regardless, models as sophisticated tools in the scientist’s toolbox are enormously beneficial. Air dispersion models have helped us understand and reduce air contaminant concentrations. Climate models have greatly improved awareness of atmospheric dynamics and potential long-term changes.
This critique does not denigrate atmospheric modeling in any way or at any level, small or large. Rather, it is more of a cautionary tale to reduce bombastic certitude and add humility to the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the atmosphere. In the real world of heat and humidity, wind and pressure, land and sea, mountain and valley, no one knows with sufficient clarity the end of the climate story or even its subsequent chapters in the decades ahead.
As the saying goes, “There are two sides to every story.” For the longest time, the scary side of a cacophony of climate calamity has been the one pandered to. Now it appears that, to the betterment of science and the serenity of society, the other side — a less scary, more realistic side — of the complicated climate story is being given a fair public hearing.
This piece originally appeared at WashingtonTimes.com and has been republished here with permission.
