In response to the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on global warming, the Western world’s newspapers seemed to be competing to publish the most apocalyptic headlines possible. But behind all the talk of “catastrophe,” the celebrities and environmentalist leaders who fly to every conference in their carbon-spewing private jets really don’t believe a word of the panic. Nor should they.
Yes, there is consensus that human activity has increased the carbon dioxide concentration in the Earth’s atmosphere. This has already raised world average temperatures by just over 1 degree Celsius since 1880. There is consensus, as of this IPCC report, that the temperature rise could reach as high as 4 degrees Celsius (that’s lower than previous IPCC projections), although the IPCC considers 3 C to be a better estimate. There’s also consensus that it’s not good for humans to change Earth’s climate, as the results could be unpredictable.
But that’s where the consensus ends. There is no consensus that Earth is doomed by global warming. And there won’t be such a consensus, no matter how much the authors of the report’s summary choose to hype things up with alarming language.
You wouldn’t know it from the media coverage, but neither the data in the new IPCC report nor science as a whole endorses the logical fallacy that every adverse weather event we see is a consequence of rising atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide. For example, you probably haven’t read anywhere that the United Nations report specifically throws cold water on the idea recent flooding in Europe was related to climate change. This is true of nearly all recent weather phenomena because climate isn’t weather. Yet, in their coverage of this report, the media endlessly indulge this classic fallacy.
Usually, bad weather is just that — even if you try to dress it up with charged terms, such as “extreme climate event.” Bad and extreme weather has been happening for millennia, and it used to cause a lot more damage and death than it does today. As environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg pointed out in a recent op-ed, the slight rise in global temperatures attributed to global warming is currently saving a net 283,000 lives each year, simply because extreme cold causes more than three times as many deaths as extreme heat.
The media and the environmental extremists whose views they promote are employing shocking disaster conjectures and other forms of what can only be called “panic pornography.” They aim to turn the boring reality of gradual global warming by a few degrees over a century into something with a bit of science fiction pizzazz that can capture the public’s imagination. Thus, environmental extremists habitually say things to shock people, dressing up their unwarranted alarmism with scientific jargon.
Hence RFK Jr.’s dire predictions about Washingtonians never seeing snow again, Paul Ehrlich’s now-laughable warnings about impending water and food rationing by 1980, and further bogus claims that both the Maldives and New York City’s West Side Highway would be underwater by 2008.
What’s funny is that, for all of their Chicken Little predictions, the most prominent doomsayers don’t take practical measures that could bring a quick end to most carbon emissions almost overnight. That’s because their real aim is to force humanity into a poorer lifestyle and to impede what they view as an evil capitalist system and its economic development.
If carbon pollution were truly their chief concern, they would zealously support fracking so that natural gas becomes an ever-cheaper reliable substitute for coal. After all, natural gas emits half the carbon, and its adoption has done more to reduce carbon emissions than all of the environmentalists in history combined.
They would pursue rapid expansion of reliable nuclear and hydroelectric power. After all, endangered salmon will not survive if the Earth perishes. And even the thorny issue of nuclear waste would pale in significance to the possibility that we have only 12 — or, sorry, 10 — years left to act before Earth cannot be saved.
Fortunately, there is no scientific basis for any of these dire predictions. And just as fortunately, the discerning reader has by now learned to tune out most news reports about climate change.
