As the Trump administration delivers a decisive middle finger to the United Nations’ COP30 circus in Belém, Brazil, skepticism about the entire climate-change narrative is roaring back louder than ever. Respected scientists, from Nobel laureate John Clauser to Judith Curry and Richard Lindzen, are once again pointing out what was always obvious: the exact contribution of human CO₂ to the observed warming remains deeply uncertain, with satellite data showing far less dramatic temperature rise than the doomsday models predicted. Meanwhile, the “solutions” on the table, carbon taxes, trillion-dollar green slush funds, ESG mandates, and the great wind-and-solar grift, look less like science and more like the biggest wealth transfer in human history. Normal people are noticing that every hurricane, flood, or heat wave is still breathlessly blamed on your SUV, while the same prophets who promised snowless winters and submerged Manhattan by 2008 keep moving the goalposts and cashing the checks.

Into this vacuum of credibility waddles Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, the lone American federal official bothering to show up at COP30, a Rhode Island Democrat who has turned climate alarmism into performance art. For years he has treated the Senate floor like his personal doomsday pulpit, delivering weekly rants about “climate denial” being funded by Big Oil (while conveniently ignoring the hundreds of billions flowing to his own side from green investors, renewable-energy lobbyists, and billionaire virtue-signal funds). His greatest hits include comparing skeptics to flat-earthers, promising that Florida will be underwater any day now, and insisting that anyone who questions the models is literally killing children. The sheer theatrical hysteria has given millions of Americans some of their best laugh-out-loud moments on C-SPAN, especially when his predictions flop year after year with nothing more catastrophic than slightly warmer summers and better crop yields.

Yet the show must go on, because the money train never stops. Whitehouse’s top donors include league-of-conservation-voters types, renewable-energy firms that live off federal subsidies, and the usual coastal elite foundations that profit when governments panic. His brainwashed constituency in deep-blue Rhode Island still eats up the Malthusian sermon that modern life itself is the original sin, so he keeps cranking the fear dial to eleven. With Trump skipping the whole charade and the public increasingly tuning out the shrieking, Whitehouse’s lonely pilgrimage to COP30 looks less like leadership and more like the last believer showing up to a ghost town. The trap has snapped on the climate scare: the science is murkier than ever, the policies reek of grift, and the only thing melting faster than the glaciers is the credibility of the people still demanding we dismantle civilization to “save” it.