Turning Down the Climate-Change Heat

By Bjorn Lomborg

Thursday, March 03, 2022

 

We live in an age of fear — particularly, a fear of climate change. One picture summarizes this age for me. It is of a girl holding a sign say­­ing “You’ll die of old age. I’ll die of climate change.”

 

This is the message that the media are drilling into our heads: Climate change is destroying our planet and threatens to kill us all. The language is of apocalypse. News outlets refer to the “planet’s imminent incineration,” and analysts suggest that global warming could make humanity extinct in a few decades. Recently, the media have informed us that humanity has just a decade left to rescue the planet, that 2030 is the deadline to save civilization, and that we must radically transform every major economy to end fossil-fuel use, reduce carbon emissions to zero, and establish a totally renewable basis for all economic activity.

 

The rhetoric on climate change has become ever more extreme and less moored to the actual science. Over the past 20 years, climate scientists have painstakingly increased knowledge about climate change, and we have more — and more-reliable — data than ever before. But at the same time, the rhetoric that comes from commentators and the media has become increasingly irrational.

 

The science shows us that fears of a climate apocalypse are unfounded. Global warming is real, but it is not the end of the world. It is a manageable problem. Yet we now live in a world where almost half the population believes that cli­mate change will extinguish humanity. This has profoundly altered the political reality. It makes us double down on poor climate policies. It makes us increasingly ignore all other challenges — from pandemics and food shortages to political strife and conflicts — or subsume them under the banner of climate change.

 

This singular obsession with climate change means that we are now going from wasting billions of dollars on ineffective policies to wasting trillions. At the same time, we’re ignoring ever more of the rest of the world’s more urgent and much more tractable challenges. And we’re scaring kids and adults witless, which is not just factually wrong but morally reprehensible.

 

If we don’t say stop, the current, false climate alarm — despite the good intentions behind it — is likely to leave the world much worse off than it could be.

 

We need to dial back on the panic, look at the science, face the economics, and address the issue rationally. How do we fix climate change, and how do we prioritize it amid the many other problems afflicting the world?

 

Climate change is real, it is caused predominantly by carbon emissions from humans burning fossil fuels, and we should tackle it intelligently. But to do that, we need to stop exaggerating, stop arguing that it is now or never, and stop thinking that climate is the only thing that matters.

 

Many climate campaigners go further than the science supports. They implicitly or even explicitly suggest that ex­aggeration is acceptable because the cause is so important. After a recent U.N. climate-science report led to over-the-top claims by activists, Joel Smith, one of the scientist authors, warned against exaggeration. He wrote, “We risk turning off the public with extremist talk that is not carefully supported by the science.” He is right. But the impact of exaggerated climate claims goes far deeper.

 

We are being told that we must do everything right away. Conventional wisdom, repeated ad nauseam in the media, is that we have only until 2030 to solve the problem of climate change. This is what science tells us!

 

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But this is not what science tells us. It’s what politics tells us. This deadline comes from politicians asking scientists a very specific and hypothetical question — basically, What will it take to keep climate change below an almost impossible target (2 degrees centigrade, or 3.6°F)? Not surprisingly, scientists responded that doing so would be almost impossible, and getting anywhere close would require enormous changes to all parts of society by 2030.

 

Imagine a similar discussion on traffic deaths. In the United States, 40,000 people die each year in car crashes. If politicians asked scientists how to reduce the number of road deaths to zero, an almost impossible target, one good answer would be to set the national speed limit to 3 mph. Probably nobody would die. But science is not telling us that we must have a speed limit of 3 mph — it only informs us that if we want zero deaths, one simple way to achieve that would be through a nationwide, heavily enforced 3 mph speed limit. Yet how to make the trade-off between a low speed limit and a connected society is a political question for all of us.

 

Today, such is our single-minded focus on climate change that many global, regional, and even personal challenges are almost entirely subsumed by climate change. Your house is at risk of flooding — climate change! Your community is at risk of being devastated by a hurricane — climate change! People starving in the developing world — climate change! With almost all problems identified as caused by climate, the apparent solution is to drastically reduce carbon dioxide emissions in order to reduce the effects of climate change. But is this really the best way to help?

 

If you want to help people in the Mississippi floodplains lower the risk of flooding, there are policies that will help more than cutting carbon dioxide, and they would also be faster and cheaper. These could include improving water management, building taller dikes, and implementing stronger regulations that allowed some floodplains to flood so as to avoid or alleviate flooding elsewhere. If you want to help people in the developing world avoid starvation, it is almost tragicomic to focus on cutting carbon dioxide. Better crop varieties, more fertilizer, market access, and general opportunities to get out of poverty would help them so much more, faster, and at lower cost. If we insist on invoking climate at every turn, we will often end up helping the world in one of the least effective ways possible.

 

As a species, we are not on the brink of imminent extinction. In fact, quite the opposite. The rhetoric of impending doom belies an absolutely essential point: In almost every way we can measure, life on earth is better now than it was at any time in history.

 

Since 1900, we have more than doubled our life expectancy. In 1900, the average life span was just 33 years — today it is more than 71. The increase has had the most dramatic impact on the world’s worst-off. Health inequality has diminished significantly. The world is more literate; child labor has been dropping; we are living in one of the most peaceful times in history. Between 1990 and 2015, the percentage of people in the world practicing open defecation dropped from 30 to 15 percent.

 

The planet is getting healthier, too. In the past half century, we have made substantial cuts in indoor air pollution, pre­viously the biggest environmental killer. In 1990, pollution caused more than 8 percent of deaths; this has almost halved, to 4.7 percent, meaning that 1.2 million people survive each year who would have died. Higher agricultural yields and changing attitudes to the environment have meant that rich countries are increasingly preserving forests and reforesting. And since 1990, 2.6 billion more people have gained access to improved water sources, bringing the global total of people with access to improved water to 91 percent.

 

Many of these improvements have come about because we have gotten richer, both as individuals and as nations. Over the past 30 years, the average global income per person has almost doubled. That has driven massive cuts in poverty. In 1990, nearly four in ten people on the planet were poor, meaning they made less than $1.90 per day. Today, it is less than one in ten.

 

When we are richer, we live longer and have better lives. We live with less indoor air pollution. Governments provide more health care, build better safety nets, and enact stronger laws and regulations to battle pollution and protect the environment.

 

Significantly, progress has not ended. The world has been radically transformed for the better in the last century, and it will continue to improve in the century to come. Analysis by experts shows that we are likely to become much, much better off in the future. Researchers working for the United Nations suggest that by 2100, average incomes will greatly increase, perhaps to 450 percent of today’s incomes. Life expectancy will continue to increase, to 82 years or possibly beyond 100. As countries and individuals get richer, air pollution will reduce even further.

 

Climate change will have a negative impact on the world, but it will pale in comparison with all the positive gains that we have seen so far and that we will continue to see in the century ahead. These gains that we both have seen and will see come from the general economic development described above. The best current research shows that the cost of climate change by the end of the century, if we do nothing, will be less than 4 percent of global GDP. This includes all the negative impacts — not just the increased costs from stronger storms but also the costs of increased deaths from heat waves and the lost wetlands from rising sea levels.

 

This means that instead of seeing incomes rise by 450 percent by 2100, they might increase by “only” 434 percent. That’s clearly a problem. But it’s also clearly not a catastrophe. As the members of the U.N. Climate Panel put it themselves: “For most economic sectors, the impact of climate change will be small relative to the impacts of other drivers [such as] changes in population, age, income, technology, relative prices, lifestyle, regulation, governance, and many other aspects of socioeconomic development” (italics added).

 

This is the information we should be teaching our children. The young girl holding the sign that reads “I’ll die from climate change” will not, in fact, die from climate change. She is very likely to live a longer, more prosperous life than her parents or her grandparents, and she will be less affected by pollution or poverty.

 

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In my new book False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet, I examine the culture of fear that has been created around climate change. I clarify what the science actually tells us. What is the cost of rising temperatures? After that, I assess what’s wrong with today’s approach. How is it that climate change is at the front of our minds, yet we are failing to solve it? What do we achieve by making changes to our lifestyles? What are we achieving collectively, with promises made under the Paris agreement on climate change? And finally, the book explores how we can actually solve climate change. We need to prioritize policies such as green innovation and adaptation in order to rein in temperature rises and leave the planet in the best shape possible for our grand­children.

 

We have it within our power to make a better world. But first, we need to calm down.

 

Note: This essay is adapted from the author’s book, False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet.