The Alarming Thing About Climate Alarmism
Exaggerated, worst-case claims
result in bad policy and they ignore a wealth of encouraging data.
By Bjorn Lomborg
It is an indisputable fact that
carbon emissions are rising—and faster than most scientists predicted. But many
climate-change alarmists seem to claim that all climate change is worse than
expected. This ignores that much of the data are actually encouraging. The
latest study from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change found that in the previous 15 years temperatures had risen 0.09 degrees
Fahrenheit. The average of all models expected 0.8 degrees. So we’re seeing
about 90% less temperature rise than expected.
Facts like this are important
because a one-sided focus on worst-case stories is a poor foundation for sound
policies. Yes, Arctic sea ice is melting faster than the models expected. But
models also predicted that Antarctic sea ice would decrease, yet it is increasing.
Yes, sea levels are rising, but the rise is not accelerating—if anything, two
recent papers, one by Chinese scientists published in the January 2014 issue of
Global and Planetary
Change, and the other by U.S. scientists
published in the May 2013 issue of Coastal Engineering, have shown a small decline in the rate of sea-level
increase.
We are often being told that we’re
seeing more and more droughts, but a study
published last March in the journal Nature actually shows a decrease in the
world’s surface that has been afflicted by droughts since 1982.
Hurricanes are likewise used as an
example of the “ever worse” trope. If we look at the U.S., where we have the
best statistics, damage costs from hurricanes are increasing—but only because
there are more people, with more-expensive property, living near coastlines. If
we adjust for population and wealth, hurricane damage during the period
1900-2013 decreased slightly.
At the U.N. climate conference in
Lima, Peru, in December, attendees were told that their countries should cut
carbon emissions to avoid future damage from storms like typhoon Hagupit, which
hit the Philippines during the conference, killing at least 21 people and
forcing more than a million into shelters. Yet the trend for landfalling typhoons
around the Philippines has actually declined since 1950, according to a study published in 2012 by the American Meteorological Society’s
Journal of Climate. Again, we’re told that things are worse than ever, but the
facts don’t support this.
This is important because if we want
to help the poor people who are most threatened by natural disasters, we have
to recognize that it is less about cutting carbon emissions than it is about
pulling them out of poverty.
The best way to see this is to look
at the world’s deaths from natural disasters over time. In the Oxford
University database for death rates from floods, extreme temperatures, droughts
and storms, the average in the first part of last century was more than 13 dead
every year per 100,000 people. Since then the death rates have dropped 97% to a
new low in the 2010s of 0.38 per 100,000 people.
The dramatic decline is mostly due
to economic development that helps nations withstand catastrophes. If you’re
rich like Florida, a major hurricane might cause plenty of damage to expensive
buildings, but it kills few people and causes a temporary dent in economic
output. If a similar hurricane hits a poorer country like the Philippines or
Guatemala, it kills many more and can devastate the economy.
In short, climate change is not
worse than we thought. Some indicators are worse, but some are better. That
doesn’t mean global warming is not a reality or not a problem. It definitely
is. But the narrative that the world’s climate is changing from bad to worse is
unhelpful alarmism, which prevents us from focusing on smart solutions.
A well-meaning environmentalist
might argue that, because climate change is a reality, why not ramp up the
rhetoric and focus on the bad news to make sure the public understands its
importance. But isn’t that what has been done for the past 20 years? The public
has been bombarded with dramatic headlines and apocalyptic photos of climate
change and its consequences. Yet despite endless successions of climate
summits, carbon emissions continue to rise, especially in rapidly developing
countries like India, China and many African nations.
Alarmism has encouraged the pursuit
of a one-sided climate policy of trying to cut carbon emissions by subsidizing
wind farms and solar panels. Yet today, according to the International Energy
Agency, only about 0.4% of global energy consumption comes from solar
photovoltaics and windmills. And even with exceptionally optimistic assumptions
about future deployment of wind and solar, the IEA expects that these energy
forms will provide a minuscule 2.2% of the world’s energy by 2040.
In other words, for at least the
next two decades, solar and wind energy are simply expensive, feel-good
measures that will have an imperceptible climate impact. Instead, we should
focus on investing in research and development of green energy, including new
battery technology to better store and discharge solar and wind energy and
lower its costs. We also need to invest in and promote growth in the world’s
poorest nations, which suffer the most from natural disasters.
Climate-change doomsayers
notwithstanding, we urgently need balance if we are to make sensible choices
and pick the right climate policy that can help humanity slow, and inevitably
adapt to, climate change.
Mr. Lomborg, director of the
Copenhagen Consensus Center, is the author of “The Skeptical Environmentalist”
(Cambridge Press, 2001) and “Cool It” (Knopf, 2007).
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