Activists’ tales of doom never pan out, but they leave us poorly informed and lead to bad policy.
Whatever happened to polar bears? They used to be all that climate campaigners could talk about, but now they’re essentially absent from headlines. [emphasis, some links added]
Over the past 20 years, climate activists have elevated various stories of climate catastrophe, then quietly dropped them without apology when the opposing evidence becomes overwhelming. The only constant is the scare tactics.
Protesters used to dress up as polar bears. Al Gore’s 2006 film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” depicted a sad cartoon polar bear floating away to its death.
The Washington Post warned in 2004 that the species could face extinction, and the World Wildlife Fund’s chief scientist claimed some polar bear populations would be unable to reproduce by 2012.
Then in the 2010s, campaigners stopped talking about them. After years of misrepresentation, it finally became impossible to ignore the mountain of evidence showing that the global polar bear population has increased substantially.
Whatever negative effect climate change had was swamped by the reduction in hunting of polar bears. The population has risen from around 12,000 in the 1960s to about 26,000.
The same thing has happened with activists’ outcry about Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. For years, they shouted that the reef was being killed off by rising sea temperatures.
After a hurricane extensively damaged the reef in 2009, official Australian estimates of the percent of reef covered in coral reached a record low in 2012.
The media overflowed with stories about the great reef catastrophe, and scientists predicted the coral cover would be reduced by another half by 2022. The Guardian even published an obituary in 2014.
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 1986, with 2024 setting a new record.
This good news gets a fraction of the coverage that the panicked predictions did.
More recently, green campaigners warned that small Pacific islands would drown as sea levels rose.
In 2019 United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres flew to Tuvalu, in the South Pacific, for a Time magazine cover shot. Wearing a suit, he stood up to his thighs in the water behind the headline “Our Sinking Planet.”
The accompanying article warned the island—and others like it—would be struck “off the map entirely” by rising sea levels.
About a month ago, the New York Times finally shared what it called “surprising” climate news: Almost all atoll islands are stable or increasing in size.
In fact, scientific literature has documented this 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 and many other small islands is increasing.
Today, killer heat waves are the new climate horror story. In July President Biden claimed “extreme heat is the No. 1 weather-related killer in the United States.”
He is wrong by a factor of 25.
While extreme heat kills nearly 6,000 Americans each year, cold kills 152,000, of which 12,000 die from extreme cold. Even including deaths from moderate heat, the toll comes to less than 10,000.
Despite rising temperatures, age-standardized extreme-heat deaths have declined in the U.S. by almost 10% a decade and globally by even more, largely because the world is growing more prosperous.
That allows more people to afford air conditioners and other technology that protects them from the heat.
The petrified tone of heat-wave coverage twists policy illogically. Whether from heat or cold, the most sensible way to save people from temperature-related deaths would be to ensure access to cheap, reliable electricity.
That way, it wouldn’t be only the rich who could afford to keep safe from blistering or frigid weather. Unfortunately, much of climate policy makes affordable energy all the harder to obtain.
Activists do the world a massive disservice by refusing to acknowledge facts that challenge their intensely doom-ridden worldview.
There is ample evidence that man-made emissions cause changes in the climate, and climate economics generally finds that the costs of these effects outweigh the benefits.
But the net result is nowhere near catastrophic. The costs of all the extreme policies that campaigners push for are much worse.
All told, politicians across the world are now spending more than $2 trillion annually—far more than the estimated cost of climate change that these policies prevent each year.
Scare tactics leave everyone—especially young people—distressed and despondent. Fear leads to poor policy choices that further frustrate the public. And the ever-changing narrative of disasters erodes public trust.
Telling half-truths while piously pretending to “follow the science” benefits activists with their fundraising, generates clicks for media outlets, and helps climate-concerned politicians rally their bases.
But it leaves all of us poorly informed and worse off.
Mr. Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus, a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and the author of “Best Things First: The 12 Most Efficient Solutions for the World’s Poorest and our Global SDG Promises.”
Top photo by Hans-Jurgen Mager on Unsplash
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