The High Priest of Ecomodernism and His Dangerous Faith
Ted Nordhaus wants us to stop talking about climate catastrophe. He calls Amazon collapse, crossing tipping points, and weather shocks exaggerations. He acknowledges that the world is headed toward 3°C of warming, but is confident that society will adapt.
That is techno-optimism at its most absurd—ignoring physiology, geography, and demographics. At ~3°C, the world crosses into extreme mortality events, recurrent food shocks, and mass displacement as “normal” features of the system.
Nordhaus is co-founder of The Breakthrough Institute, the think tank behind “ecomodernism”—the belief that humanity can decouple growth from environmental harm by intensifying technology: urbanization, nuclear energy, industrial agriculture. Its arguments are based on extrapolation of past trends, not hard evidence.
In “Why I Stopped Being a Climate Catastrophist,” Nordhaus claims 3°C is serious but manageable. Climate catastrophism is more dangerous than climate change itself. He points to declining disaster mortality, rising food production, and low tipping-point risks as proof that societies can adapt. The real danger, he says, is alarmism: distorted science, bad politics, and clean-energy policies tied to exaggerated fears. In other words, if something bad hasn’t happened yet, it probably won’t happen.
Nordhaus is the high priest in a technology cult. His optimism rests on faith and selective graphs—like a dated chart showing declining carbon intensity of energy, conveniently ending a decade ago (see Figure 1).
CO₂ per unit of energy has fallen but total emissions keep climbing because demand keeps rising (see Figure 2). Fossil fuels still dominate and the emissions problem is far from solved. Using Ecomodernism’s extrapolation of past trends, this isn’t going to change. Bad logic works both ways.
Nordhaus writes that the Amazon isn’t at risk in 50 years because global drought hasn’t increased. That’s sloppy logic. Collapse isn’t linear. The Amazon makes its own rain—cut enough trees or raise the heat and it can shift from rain forest to savanna. Soil depletion, water stress, and climate volatility don’t follow straight-line projections. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Ecosystems fail abruptly, not gradually. Uncertainty doesn’t reduce risk—it magnifies it.
He argues that disasters are more about where and how people build than about climate change. That may be technically true today, but it misses the point. Climate change is the backdrop that amplifies every hazard, increasing the risk for stronger heatwaves, longer droughts, heavier rains, and forest fires. Places that are risky now are becoming uninhabitable as baselines shift.
Nordhaus insists the risks of crossing tipping points are overstated. Ice sheets, permafrost, and ocean circulation shifts take centuries, he says. But Earth systems don’t always move slowly. Feedbacks can accelerate once thresholds are crossed. Dismissing risks as improbable is reckless. Precaution is rational.
Most disturbing is his glib claim that 3°C warming is “serious but survivable.” Survivable for whom? Based on what evidence? Few scientists treat 3°C as manageable. Three degrees won’t end the planet, but it will end the world we know.
Heat
We are already at 1.2–1.5°C. Cities in India, the Middle East, and Africa are flirting with wet-bulb temperatures humans cannot survive without air conditioning. At 3°C, whole regions will face this regularly. Outdoor labor becomes impossible. Grid failures mean mass casualties. Many regions of the world will not escape. Tens of thousands will die each year in heat waves. Declining cold-weather deaths won’t offset tens of thousands of heat deaths each year.
Food
Nordhaus points to today’s rising crop yields. But the real threat is climate stability. Agriculture arose only because the Holocene’s unusually stable climate made planting and harvest predictable. At 3°C, that stability unravels.
Migration
The World Bank already projects over 200 million internal climate migrants by 2050 under softer scenarios. At 3°C, the numbers swell. Most movement will be internal, but cross-border flows will drive nationalism and conflict. This is not hypothetical—tens of millions are already displaced each year by storms, floods, and droughts. Three degrees pushes the system from strain to rupture.
Tipping Points
Nordhaus calls tipping points overblown. Yet permafrost methane isn’t just a centuries-long process. The Atlantic overturning circulation is weakening now. A sharp slowdown would shift rainfall across Africa, South Asia, and South America, hitting billions. Low probability does not mean low risk. Complex systems fail non-linearly—that is the real danger.
Planetary Boundaries
Climate is not the only pressure point. Six of nine planetary boundaries are already breached. At 3°C, extinction accelerates, forests collapse, water stress deepens. Boundaries don’t fail gracefully—they cascade.
Energy and Economics
Nordhaus ignores the physics of energy. The story of “transitions”—wood to coal, coal to oil, oil to gas—was never substitution, only stacking (see Figure 3). Today we burn more of every fuel than ever. Renewables are diffuse, intermittent, and material-intensive. They will not deliver the same surplus fossil fuels did. Growth cannot be maintained on them. Energy transitions are a myth. What lies ahead is contraction: smaller credit markets, fragile supply chains, less complexity.
Source: EIA, BP, IEA, FRED, OWWD, World Bank & Labyrinth Consulting Services, Inc.
Narratives
Nordhaus is right that alarmism can distort. But his dismissal of catastrophe at 3°C is worse—it tells people nothing fundamental must change. That reassures elites and investors but leaves societies unprepared. The real fantasy is pretending 3°C is manageable.
Three degrees means waves of heat death, clustered crop failures, migration shocks, ecosystem unraveling, and economic fragility. Not overnight, not everywhere, but relentlessly. It may be survivable—but only if we abandon illusions. Substitution does not solve overshoot. More energy, no matter how clean, fuels more growth, more extraction, more collapse.
The real work is preparing for descent: imagining economies that function with less, re-anchoring communities, and adapting culturally to live within limits. Collapse is not the end; it is the context. Transformation begins not with mass movements but with small islands of coherence that can ripple outward when the system falters. That is how change has always happened. This moment is no different.
What matters now is to begin—cultivating clarity, courage, and imagination in our communities so that when the time comes, there is something solid to stand on.
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Global warming is not just the fault of CO2, we see graphs of CO2 increases and global temperatures increasing at commensurate rates. However what is hardly ever shown are the regional differences that are far more stark. Temperatures in the Middle East and Pakistan hitting 40c or 45c, while areas closer to the equator which should be hotter, are ten degrees cooler.
Iraq, Iran, Pakistan are on the brink of water system collapse after years of increasing droughts and the desperate need to water crops in the blistering heat.
Scientists are only starting to understand how vegetation particularly trees cool the environment. Not just via photosynthesis but mainly from tapping into the ground water and releasing it into the atmosphere. The net effect of a forest is to cool the area by 10 or 15 degrees. The water vapour then goes on to become clouds which deliver rain to other places. Life supporting more life.
Trouble is we are cutting down 15 billion trees each year and now far more are destroyed by fires. Pakistan has over the centuries destroyed most of its forests and is now reaping the consequences. No wonderful technology can fix the droughts or relentless heat. Only repairing what has been destroyed will make any difference.
Jan,
I have consistently argued that climate change isn’t really a problem but a consequence of ecological overshoot.
All the best,
Art
It seems that climate change was an invention of a famous guy…
Are you familiar with the book «Rockefeller: Controlling the Game» (Jacob Nordangard)?
Miguel,
Your comment is incoherent.
Art
Isn’t it interesting to think about climate change? It’s not an invention—it’s been a part of our planet’s story for around 4.5 billion years! Throughout Earth’s history, all living things have influenced their environment and, in turn, the climate. It’s a natural part of the planet’s evolution!
Martin,
That’s pure earth systems ignorance and a reductive cliche rendition of complex reality. I encourage you to get your head out of the confirmation bias echo chamber that is run principally for the financial gain of climate amateurs, and actually read my many posts that expose the ridiculous logic expressed in your comment, and many like it.
All the best,
Art
Art, your own presentation of historical temperature measurements show a linear increase since fossil fuels became widely used, and at the same time the concentration of CO2 has increased exponentially, does that not bother you ? In fact the global temperature has been increasing since the Little Ice Age with no real data showing that the rate of increase has changed at all. None of Al Gore’s “predictions” are even remotely true. All of what we call climate change predictions are based on climate models that constantly change themselves, sorry but basically it is all about grant money to do “research”. You are a geologist, you must know that throughout the Pleistocene there have been sudden and extreme changes in climate completely unrelated to atmospheric CO2 concentrations. The projected “hockey stick” shape of temperatures is complete nonsense. Yes the Earth’s climate is changing but it always has…
Jim,
The correlation between CO2 and temperature has been well established since Fourier’s work in the 1820s. The science couldn’t be clearer. I suggest getting your head out of the confirmation bias echo chamber run by earth science charlatans, open your mind, and deal with reality.
All the best,
Art
Without a doubt there is a correlation between temperature and co2. Though a trivial and boring one, it serves as the foundation for the rhetoric that distracts from the actual cause of the energy issue. That being the failure between the current form of capitalism and the escalating economics of oil and gas production. The wheel don’t go round if the gas costs to much.
John,
Blaming capitalism is about as useful as blaming human nature. People need to earn a living. People will be people regardless of the economic system. Communist and socialist societies use capitalism. Marxist councils failed because of human nature.
How about we move past blaming and get on with the real work of understanding?
“The law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm.”
—Bertrand Russell
All the best,
Art
Guys like that live in a made up world ,aside from the heat waves the rain storms are a whole new thing literally downpours that go on for 10 hours or 5 month heat waves of over 100f ( I literally worked outside daily since 2001 and its very noticeable) you can’t function in certain weather you literally start getting heat stroke its not a economic question its real world limits
Ive given up even talking to anyone about it most people act like medieval peasantry when it comes to climate change
AA,
Nordhaus represents a serious contingent of otherwise intelligent people including Bill Gates who worship at the altar of technology. Not much that can be done to change religious beliefs.
All the best,
Art
I also wondered about this Ted Nordhaus and his oxymoronic ecomodernist thinking . Ignorance is bliss with these kind of thinkers. He seems to love linear projections and doesn’t see the need for learning something about complex, non-linear systems before trying to impress everybody with his dubious knowledge. I am inclined to call him a linear twit.
Ray,
Nordhaus is typical of the reductive thinking that got us into this mess in the first place. It’s not new but began in the 3rd millennium BCE with the development of astronomical mathematics. I’ve written many posts about this but his is probably the most apropos: https://www.artberman.com/blog/pharaohs-to-ai-the-long-ascent-of-the-superorganism/
All the best,
Art
It’s not 3degrees centigrade it’s 3 centigrade degrees
I see Ted Nordhaus is a nephew of William Nordhaus the famous economist who provided the key, if ludicrous, intellectual justification for ongoing US non-leadership on the matter of climate change, thus not facing this and other consequences of runaway industrial growth. (See economist Steve Keen’s critique of DICE models, and the quote from the W. Nordhaus, 1993 paper.) Lesser figures in the UK like Mrs Thatcher’s last Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson picked up the banner here.
Thanks Art…
PS I like to share… fwiw, bluesky,social and substack also reach across to others.
Philip,
I’m aware of that Norhaus connection. Perhaps there’s something in the family genes or psychology that makes otherwise intelligent people hopelessly reductive and delusional.
All the best,
Art
A shame it all has to happen with 8 billion people having to struggle with it. I live comfortably so far in the global North but this horror movie has to play out over my lifetime.
Chris,
Thanks for your comments.
All the best,
Art