Looking back on more than 20 years of climate agitation, two themes emerge: a stubborn unwillingness by campaigners to acknowledge any inconvenient science and ever-shifting favorite stories, first elevated and then dropped by the wayside. [emphasis, links added]
The one constant: a fixation on scaring the public, which has in turn shaped bad climate policies.
At the start of this century, the polar bear was the emblem of climate apocalypse.
Protesters dressed as polar bears, while Al Gore’s hit 2006 film “An Inconvenient Truth” showed us a sad, animated polar bear floating away to its death.
The Washington Post warned that polar bears faced extinction, and the World Wildlife Fund’s chief scientist even claimed some polar bear populations would be unable to reproduce by 2012.
And then in the 2010s, campaigners just stopped talking about polar bears.
Why? After years of misrepresentation, it finally became impossible for them to ignore a mountain of evidence showing that the global polar bear population has increased substantially from around 12,000 in the 1960s to around 26,000 in the present day. (The main reason? People are hunting a lot less polar bears).
The same thing has happened with depictions of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.
For decades, campaigners shouted that the reef was being killed off by rising sea temperatures.
After extensive damage from a hurricane in 2009, official Australian estimates of coral cover reached a low in 2012.
The media was flooded with claims of the “Great Reef Catastrophe” and scientists predicted the reef would be decimated by 2022. The Guardian even published an obituary.
The latest official statistics show a completely different picture.
For the past three years, the Great Barrier Reef has had more coral cover than at any point since records began in 1985, with 2024 setting a new record.
Doesn't fit the narrative, but
2024 record coral cover for Great Barrier Reef
Based on official data for all 11 sectors of GBR,
Last three years, 2022-2024, have been unprecedented
Data: https://t.co/MQ0qkITsby pic.twitter.com/fJN15BjHMk
— Bjorn Lomborg (@BjornLomborg) July 2, 2024
The good news gets a fraction of the coverage that the scare stories did.
An often-recurrent climate story has been the alleged drowning of small Pacific islands due to sea level rise.
In 2019, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres flew to Tuvalu for a Time magazine cover-shot.
Wearing a suit, he stood up to his thighs in the water, demonstrating “our sinking planet.” The accompanying article warned the island — and others like it — would be struck “off the map entirely” by rising sea levels.
This summer, the New York Times finally shared what it called “surprising” climate news: almost all atoll islands are increasing in size. In fact, the scientific literature has documented this trend for more than a decade.
While rising sea levels do erode land, additional sand from old coral is washed up on low-lying shores.
Extensive studies have long shown this accretion is stronger than climate-caused erosion, meaning the land area of Tuvalu is increasing.
Climate change is real. It is man-made. It is a challenge that needs sensible policies.
But campaigners do their cause a massive disservice by refusing to acknowledge evidence that challenges their intensely doom-ridden worldview.
All these misguided claims add up and have shaped the climate panic that has led to politicians passing climate legislation that now costs the world more than $2 trillion annually, for a tiny benefit.
Today, killer heat waves are the new scare story – and the latest example of willful blindness to the bigger picture.
Recently, President Biden claimed, “Extreme heat is the number one weather-related killer in the United States.” He was wrong by a factor of 25.
While extreme heat annually kills nearly 6,000 people, cold kills 152,000 Americans each year, of which 12,000 die from extreme cold.
Despite rising temperatures, age-standardized extreme heat deaths have declined in the US by almost 10% per decade and globally by even more, largely because more prosperous people are better able to afford air conditioners.
If 6,000 heatwave deaths are a genuine priority, a sensible response would be to ensure American electricity remains cheap so it’s not just the rich who can afford to keep air conditioning running.
They erode the public trust by emphasizing heat deaths because they fit the narrative while ignoring much greater numbers of cold deaths.
The same policy prescription would hold if President Biden were to pay attention to the 152,000 Americans dying each year from the cold.
Strokes and heart attacks spike when older people can’t afford to heat their homes through winter.
Sadly, rather than keeping energy costs low, a lot of climate policy does the opposite.
It is hard not to see a pattern of climate-alarmed campaigners scaring people witless and choosing to ignore inconvenient science for as long as they can — before simply switching to a new climate fright when it becomes too awkward not to.
But scare campaigns have consequences. They leave everyone — and especially young people — distressed and despondent.
Fear leads to poor policy choices, like Western governments spending trillions of dollars on ineffective climate responses.
And they erode the public trust by emphasizing heat deaths because they fit the narrative while ignoring much greater numbers of cold deaths.
Telling half-truths whilst piously purporting to be following the science benefits activists with their fundraising, generates clicks for media outlets, and helps politicians rally voters.
But it leaves all of us poorly informed and worse off.
Top photo by Hans-Jurgen Mager on Unsplash
Bjorn Lomborg is President of the Copenhagen Consensus, Visiting Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and author of “False Alarm” and “Best Things First.”
One of the more recent studies proved that no significant warming is caused by CO2 emissions. WIlly Soon’s large study involving 40 scientists proved that the sun’s varying solar output provides variation in the climate over long periods of time. The two increases in temperature during the last century 1910 to 1945/50 and a similar increase from 1978 to 98 plus a decrease in temperature from 1950 to 1978 correlate perfectly with the solar variation. Also he proved that increases in temperature data in the USA affected and biased by Urban Heat Island effect. This is where weather stations once properly installed years ago in a field near a city are now been surrounded by Urban sprawl and temp. measurements falsely increased by heat radiation from brick, cement, pavement and air conditioning exhaust. Willy segregated the rural weather station data in the USA and found that little warming had occurred. If this has happened in the USA, chances are that it has happened all over the world. Conclusion: the increase in temperature has increased only by a small margin from the 1930’s. In the history of the planet , CO2 has never caused an increase or a decrease in temperature, even when it reached 5000 parts per million. One other issue is that about the time that temperature measurement began in the 1800’s, the earth was naturally warming from a 500 year Little Ice Age, which began in around 1300 which was at least partially caused by three Grand Solar Minimums ( periods of significant decrease in solar activity) during this period and exacerbated by at least on major volcanic eruption resulting in colder temperatures for centuries. The Thames froze over many years as well as the Baltic Sea during this time. Crops yields fell severely during this cold period causing starvation to millions in Europe.
As John Bentley mentioned above, I have some respect for Lomborg but he is dead wrong when he suggests that CO2 emissions are a cause of the slight warming that has occurred. One of the more recent studies proved this. WIlly Soon’s large study involving 40 scientists proved that the sun’s varying solar output provides variation in the climate over long periods of time. The two increases in temperature during the last century 1910 to 1945/50 and a similar increase from 1978 to 98 plus a decrease in temperature from 1950 to 1978 correlate perfectly with the solar variation. Also he proved that increases in temperature data in the USA affected and biased by Urban Heat Island effect. This is where weather stations once properly installed years ago in a field near a city are now been surrounded by Urban sprawl and temp. measurements falsely increased by heat radiation from brick, cement, pavement and air conditioning exhaust. Willy segregated the rural weather station data in the USA and found that little warming had occurred. If this has happened in the USA, chances are that it has happened all over the world. Conclusion: the increase in temperature has increased only by a small margin from the 1930’s. In the history of the planet , CO2 has never caused an increase or a decrease in temperature, even when it reached 5000 parts per million. Lomborg is correct in some of his information but he is wrong about man made emissions causing warming. One other issue is that about the time that temperature measurement began in the 1800’s, the earth was naturally warming from a 500 year Little Ice Age, which began in around 1300 which was at least partially caused by three Grand Solar Minimums ( periods of significant decrease in solar activity) during this period and exacerbated by at least on major volcanic eruption resulting in colder temperatures for centuries. The Thames froze over many years as well as the Baltic Sea during this time. Crops yields fell severely during this cold period causing starvation to millions in Europe.
I’ve started to use the analogy of splitting a 1m ruler into 1,000,000 equal units and being asked to believe that just 12 of the 1,000,000 are causing all these physical issues associated with climate change. No rightminded person can believe that. I like Lomberg but I disagree with him that climate change is man made. I wholly agree that the climate changes over time but after constanrly changing the narrative of global cooling, global warming, climate change, extreme weather and the failed predictions of extinct species, drowning islands, flooded citie, ice free artic etc etc no rightminded person can believe someone who is so consistently wrong. If the costs of belief and subsequent action were zero or close to I might forgive someone for buying in to this nonsense. But they most certainly are not.
Don’t forget Arctic ice which has just bottomed out at 4 .2 million square kilometers for the fifteenth time in seventeen years. There has been no trend at either end of the year for seventeen years. The Arctic is not melting. Tell everyone.
Oh and don’t forget the mass of insulting ad hominem. Directed by alarmists at sceptics. And the continuous claims of cherry picking, distorting facts, discredited websites, paid by Big Oil ad nauseam.
“Climate change is real. It is man-made….”
Once again, Bjorn dodges the “Denier” tag. For me, that spoils the article. He makes many good observations, like responsible governments should ensure that air conditioning is affordable, instead of making the electricity necessary too expensive for many. Uncomfortable heat is an urban problem. First thing developers do is wipe out trees and greenery, replace it with pavement and roofs. They don’t replace the trees. If I wanted to experience climate change, I’d move into town.
Time just like the rest of them(Newsweek,USA TODAY NYT,s all Fake News
Don’t forget Arctic ice which has just bottomed out at 4 .2 million square kilometers for the fifteenth time in seventeen years. There has been no trend at either end of the year for seventeen years. The Arctic is not melting. Tell everyone.
I am new to this.Please tell me why these scaremongering people are spreading these doom and gloom stories.Is money the main reason,or,is it world domination?.