How Dare You?
Welcome to the Climate Skeptic!
The Climate Skeptic is the antidote to the disease of climate alarmism. It brings together some of the best contrarians in the climate debate, providing daily corrections to the tsunami of misinformation about climate change flooding through the mainstream media every day.
Each morning we publish our Climate News Round-Up – an easy-to-read digest of the top climate-related stories of the day seen through a skeptical lens. And each day we publish an article from our top team of writers – Paul Homewood, Chris Morrison, Tilak Doshi and Ben Pile, among others – who specialise in well-informed, skeptical analysis of the latest developments in the world of climate science and politics. We also publish a weekly podcast featuring one of our writers being interviewed about their latest piece.
What consensus?
Green politicians and climate change activists like to claim there’s a ‘97% consensus’ among scientists that humans are pushing the planet towards climate catastrophe. ‘Fossil fuels’ a.k.a. oil, gas and coal – the foundation of industrial society and responsible over the last two centuries for lifting the mass of humanity out of grinding poverty – are supposedly responsible for sending the Earth’s climate hurtling towards ‘tipping points’, beyond which unprecedented and devastating heating of the planet will occur. On the basis of this ‘climate emergency’ – as promulgated by the United Nations on down – a radical agenda is being imposed on the world’s population, driving up the price of energy, frustrating the development of the Global South and leaving billions of people unable to afford heating and transport.
Yet the 97% consensus is a myth, cooked up in a debunked study that surveyed thousands of papers, only a tiny fraction of which explicitly endorsed this alarmist narrative.
The truth is that many eminent scientists do not agree that the planet is on a highway to hell as a result of humans releasing carbon dioxide, a trace gas that comprises just 0.04% of the earth’s atmosphere.
William Happer, for instance, a professor of physics, emeritus, at Princeton and a former director of the Department of Energy’s Office of Science as part of George H.W. Bush’s administration. He has demonstrated that CO2’s warming effect diminishes with increased concentration, and that current and future levels are far from catastrophic. Another leading scientific skeptic is Judith Curry, a former Georgia Tech climatologist, who has lifted the lid on the uncertainties of climate models and their over-reliance on dubious assumptions about ‘tipping points’. And John Clauser is a Nobel Prize winning physicist who has called the climate crisis narrative “pseudoscience”, arguing it ignores fundamental principles of physics. As our Energy Editor Dr Tilak Doshi points out, these are not fringe voices but eminent scientists whose peer-reviewed work is grounded in empirical evidence, not shonky computer models. The list could go on – and it does, as shown by the hundreds of scientists who’ve put their name to the World Climate Declaration, which states: “There is no climate emergency.”
Why subscribe?
Subscribe to the Climate Skeptic to get the daily Climate News Round-Up in your inbox every morning, as well as short summaries of the latest analysis from our team of writers. Paid subscribers (just $5 a month or $50 a year), in addition to the free news round-up, can read all the articles in full, get access to the weekly podcast, and enjoy the satisfaction of supporting our writers, who have the same sky-high energy bills as everyone else! Climate alarmists often claim that skeptics are funded by the ‘oil and gas lobby’, but, like many of their conspiracy theories, that isn’t true. The only way we’ll be able to keep this site going is if ordinary people become paying subscribers.
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Our team
Lord Young of Acton
Toby Young is the Editor-in-Chief of the Climate Skeptic and its parent site, the Daily Sceptic. He is the author of several books, including How to Lose Friends & Alienate People, and co-founded the Knowledge Schools Trust, a multi-academy trust that offers children a classical liberal education that now has nine schools in it. He is the founder and General Secretary of the Free Speech Union and an Associate Editor of the Spectator, where he has written a weekly column for more than 20 years. In 2021 he won the Contrarian Prize and in 2024 he was made a member of the House of Lords, where he takes the Conservative whip. You can follow him on X here.
Paul Homewood
Paul Homewood is a retired accountant who has been writing sceptical pieces about climate change since 2011, mainly on his blog Not a Lot of People Know That. In addition, he has written several reports for the Global Warming Policy Foundation, including ‘The US Climate in 2019’ and ‘Defra versus Met Office – Fact-checking the state of the climate’. You can find an archive of his articles for the Daily Sceptic here.
Chris Morrison
Chris Morrison is the Environment Editor of the Daily Sceptic. He is a freelance journalist who started in financial journalism in the late 1970s. For nearly 20 years he ran a company that he set up himself, Evandale Publishing, and which he eventually sold. You can find an archive of his articles for the Daily Sceptic here and follow him on X here.
Tilak Doshi
Dr Tilak Doshi is the Energy Editor of the Daily Sceptic. He is an economist, a member of the CO2 Coalition and a former contributor to Forbes. He has a Substack, Tilak’s Substack, which you can subscribe to here. You can find an archive of his articles for the Daily Sceptic here and follow him on X here.
Ben Pile
Ben Pile is a freelance journalist and the co-founder of Climate Resistance and Climate Debate. He has a Substack, The Net Zero Scandal, which you can subscribe to here. You can find an archive of his articles for the Daily Sceptic here and follow him on X here.
Will Jones
Dr Will Jones is the Editor of the Daily Sceptic. He has a PhD in political philosophy, an MA in ethics, a diploma in theology and a BSc in mathematics.
It’s astonishing that in 2025—when we’re seeing climate disruption play out across the globe in real time—we’re still getting served reheated denial from Toby Young and The Climate Skeptic. Floods, wildfires, glacier collapse, rising seas, ocean heatwaves, and shifting growing seasons are all accelerating. Yet here we are again, with another post dismissing it all as alarmism in service of a so-called “radical green agenda.”
Let’s take his claims point by point.
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“What consensus?”
Toby casts doubt on the often-cited “97% consensus” among climate scientists, calling it a myth based on a debunked study. That’s simply false. The 97% figure comes from multiple independent studies—most notably Cook et al. (2013), which analyzed nearly 12,000 peer-reviewed papers and found overwhelming agreement that human activity is driving climate change. More recent research finds the consensus is even stronger—approaching 99% among publishing climate experts.
Cherry-picking criticisms of one paper doesn’t change the reality: the scientific consensus is robust, global, and growing. No alternative survey has shown anything remotely close to widespread dissent.
📌 Cook et al., 2013
📌 Powell, 2019 – 99% Consensus
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“CO₂ is just a trace gas…”
Yes, and so is cyanide. Trace gases can have major effects. Despite comprising only 0.04% of the atmosphere, CO₂ is crucial to Earth’s energy balance. Its heat-trapping capacity doesn’t just vanish at higher concentrations—it follows a logarithmic curve, which is well understood and incorporated into physics, climate modeling, and satellite remote sensing.
The claim that its warming effect is “saturated” is outdated and has been debunked repeatedly. If that were true, Earth’s temperature wouldn’t be climbing in step with emissions—as it clearly is.
📌 NASA on CO₂
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“But what about Happer, Curry, and Clauser?”
This is the tired “appeal to contrarian authority.” William Happer is a physicist, not a climate scientist. He’s promoted the idea that more CO₂ is good for plants and once compared climate science to Nazi propaganda. Judith Curry’s scientific work doesn’t deny human-caused warming; she questions the level of certainty and appropriate policy responses. John Clauser, a Nobel laureate in quantum mechanics, has never published peer-reviewed research on climate and openly admits to ignoring the foundational climate literature.
These are not leading voices in climate science—they’re fringe figures given amplified status by outlets with a political axe to grind.
📌 Scientific American on Clauser
📌 RealClimate on Happer
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“Climate models are flawed…”
Models don’t drive the science—they reflect our best understanding of physics, chemistry, and feedback systems. They are constantly validated against observations and have successfully predicted decades-long trends, including polar amplification, stratospheric cooling, and increasing ocean heat content. No model is perfect, but the broad patterns are confirmed by real-world data again and again.
The uncertainties are not about whether climate change is happening—they’re about how fast and how bad it will get if we stay on our current path.
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“Hundreds of scientists say there is no climate emergency”
This refers to the so-called “World Climate Declaration,” organized by Clintel—a climate denial lobby group, not a scientific body. The list is padded with non-climate scientists, engineers, lobbyists, and even the odd dentist. It’s not peer-reviewed science; it’s a PR stunt.
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Bottom Line
Toby Young is using monetized contrarianism to sell subscriptions. That’s the game here. It’s not about engaging with evidence—it’s about positioning himself as a brave truth-teller standing against the mob, even as reality crashes through the door.
If there were no climate emergency, reality wouldn’t be doing such a good job showing us otherwise.
Good. We need a lot more straightforward scepticism of anthropogenic climate change, and especially the spin-off pseudoscience of extreme weather attribution - needed because long term global warming of just over one degree Celsius since 1850 was not scary enough. Climate zealots were boasting a while back that 'climate science denial' had been defeated once and for all, so settled was the Settled Science of Man Made Global Warming, and it was therefore just a matter of dealing with the delayers and deniers of climate mitigation. They were wrong. The fundamental 'science' of anthropogenic greenhouse gas driven global warming - and extreme weather attribution - has never looked so shaky and is coming under increasing challenge from real published science and data.