By Itxu Díaz
Saturday, April 13, 2024
Almost all of us discovered as children that fear is
effective. A friend of mine, father of two very active children, ages six and
nine, tells them when they don’t want to go to bed and prefer to pillow-fight
for hours that if they don’t go to sleep a six-headed monster will come out of
the closet and devour them. It works for him. It seems a bit cruel to me (six
heads are too many), but his defense is also reasonable: “The dark bags under
my eyes are cruel too.” Fear has always worked. And prophetic fear, that which
foretells that something terrible is going to happen, is the most effective of
all.
In 1939, panic spread about the imminent disappearance of
the East Greenland glaciers; panic about the disappearance of the glaciers
remains, but so do the glaciers. In the 1970s, scientists predicted a new ice
age for the 21st century; apparently, they meant the opposite. And in 2012,
they told us that snow would disappear by 2020; I just spent a wonderful
weekend skiing. Why are so many forecasts failing? Because those making them
are not seeking the truth but the submission of public opinion.
Climate alarmism is undermining the credibility of
scientists, and politicians are largely to blame for it, in that they have made
climate change essentially ideological. In fact, progressive elites and
politicians have managed to impose a remarkable climate model: Global warming
is caused only by the West, while communist dictatorships emit only the scent
of roses into the atmosphere; so we in the West should endure draconian
mitigation measures. António Guterres, the U.N. secretary-general, recently warned
that the earth is “at its limit.” I have lost count of the number of times
Guterres has predicted planetary doom. At the U.N., they don’t even talk about
“global warming” anymore; that’s too mild. Last summer, they proclaimed the
entry into the era of “global boiling.”
Once we acknowledge climate change, however, two
questions need to be answered: What or who causes it, and is it beneficial or
harmful to us? If you open any newspaper, almost without exception, or walk
into a U.N. meeting, or Davos, or almost any Western parliament, you will hear
two confident answers: It is caused by human activity, and it is harmful. But
as Bjørn Lomborg wrote in the pages of National Review last year, while it will have negative impacts overall, there are some
positive ones, and “it is not the end of the world.”
Global warming, historically speaking, has done some good
things for humanity. Without climate oscillations we would live in a permanent
ice age, most of the world would be a glacier, it would be impossible to brew
beer, and we would have no summer vacations. The climate changes because it has
always done so, and, yes, that is happening now too.
As you may know, the climate started warming by itself
long before man inhabited the planet, even before Biden inhabited the planet,
regardless of some of our activities contributing to it. Scientists like the
researcher Javier Vinós, following the thesis of Richard Lindzen, support the
idea that climate change is a natural phenomenon caused by the sun’s activity,
although they admit that a small part of the warming is associated with
CO₂ from human activity. These are positions that are of no interest to climate
alarmism, because in the end they show that the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) models and forecasts are full of errors.
The harmful effects of global warming can include warmer
temperatures, more intense storms, the spread of diseases, rising sea levels,
or increased levels of poverty because of higher food prices. While some of
these things could happen, it cannot hurt to reflect on whether all of them are
cause for alarm. I don’t think there is anything more provocative and
countercultural today than admitting that global warming also has advantages.
Take the intersection of food prices, hunger, and poverty, for example. One of the
advantages of an increase in climate temperature is the improvement in
agricultural production in some regions, with an earlier spring and longer warm
seasons. These benefits could partially offset the damages of drought.
One scholar of the benefits of global warming is Richard
Tol of the University of Sussex, who says that the temperature change of the
past century improved human welfare by greatly enhancing global economic
output. In his piece for NR, Lomborg picked apart another alarmist theme: heat
deaths. Undoubtedly, if the planet warms, heat deaths will increase. Yet this
would also decrease deaths from the cold, which “kills eight times as many —
about 4.5 million people annually.”
Another thing that climate alarmists ignore is our
ability to adapt. Patrick J. Michaels, who served as director of the Center for
the Study of Science at the Cato Institute until his death in 2022, delved into
the so-called third way on global warming. The idea is based on four pillars:
The cost of truly doing something about global warming is far greater than the
cost of climate change itself (unless we manage to put an intensity
potentiometer on the sun); energy systems become more efficient on their own
over time (i.e., no need for government action here); the change in
temperatures will not be as extreme as alarmists say (ideal for the beach); and
people and living things have adaptive capacity. (Even the fake bears in Al
Gore’s documentary were able to get on-screen because they survived episodes of
climate change in the past.)
It is possible that the benefits of global warming will
not outweigh its costs, and it is certain that those benefits are less
strikingly portrayed in photo simulations and newspaper headlines. It is also
possible that the cost–benefit ratio will eventually be a wash. But the truth
is that hiding the benefits of global warming, as well as denying that it is at
least to some degree a natural phenomenon, only contributes to imposing a
biased narrative in order to manipulate people and to advance policies long
sought by ideologues. And those policies are expensive — very, very expensive.
It is more than reasonable for normal people not quite to credit the
relationship between spending a fortune on an EV and saving the planet.
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