One of my pet peeves is hearing people blindly spout off incorrect narratives with the presumption that they are aligned with expert opinions when in fact they are only aligned with the opinions of sensationalist zealots and uninformed journalists while being actually quite off if not contrary to expert positions.
Am I ever guilty of this? I’m sure I am. But I try not to be. I cannot say as much for many others.
Among the many, many examples of this personal grievance, climate change is possibly at the top.
[Because of the length and quality of both essays I share today, I will select longer than usual excerpts.]
Here Steven Koonin addresses the issue.
The globe has warmed by about 1.3 degrees Celsius since 1900. That is real, measured, and unambiguous, and human activity has contributed to the warming.
But the same one hundred and twenty-five years also saw the global population quintuple and the economy grow roughly twenty-five fold. Life expectancy rose by fifty years. Meanwhile, deaths from extreme weather, including hurricanes, floods, droughts, and extreme heat, fell by around 95 percent.
That decline ran alongside the warming, driven in part by the prosperity and resilience that energy has enabled. It reflects what human ingenuity and economic development do: they make societies more resilient, more adaptable, and better able to cope with whatever nature delivers.
The IPCC, the UN body that synthesizes the world’s climate science, does not dispute any of this. Its most recent assessment is in fact considerably more hedged than public discourse implies: there are no clear global trends in hurricane frequency or intensity, and drought signals are mixed and highly regional. Economic losses from weather disasters, expressed as a share of global GDP, have if anything declined slightly over the past three decades, averaging about 0.2 percent a year. A wealthier world is a more resilient one. The headlines often overstate what the science supports.
In the United States, a similar pattern holds. CDC mortality data show that cold-related deaths are roughly double heat-related deaths in recent years. The mortality data cut against the common assumption that a warming country is more dangerous.
There is also a moral dimension to this picture that rarely enters the conversation. The 1.5 billion people living in the developed world enjoy abundant, affordable energy. The remaining 6.5 billion do not have enough. Americans consume roughly thirty times more energy per capita than Nigerians, and some three billion people use less electricity in a year than the average American refrigerator. Energy poverty also means cooking indoors with wood and dung, a practice whose smoke kills an estimated two million people annually.
. . .
What, then, does the science say about the future? Answering that requires good models of how the climate will respond to growing human influence, and defensible assumptions about future emissions. Both are weaker foundations than commonly assumed.
Start with the models. The current generation, those that feed into IPCC assessments and from there into policy, have sensitivities to carbon dioxide (the warming response expected from doubling atmospheric CO2) that range from about 1.8 to 5.6 degrees, a factor of three. That gap reflects how much remains unknown about the climate system. The scientific community has worked to narrow that range by testing models against observations, and has found that many of the most sensitive models, the ones projecting the greatest warming, produce temperatures that do not match the observed record. They run too hot, and as a result have been de-weighted quietly, without the corrected headlines that should have followed.
. . .
The hardest cost to accept, though, is what has been done to young people. A generation has been told, by schools, governments, and the institutions they were raised to trust, that they face an existential threat, that the planet might be uninhabitable in their lifetimes, that the future itself was cause for dread. The data do not support that message, nor does the IPCC, read carefully. An entire generation has grown up anxious about a future the evidence does not support, and that may be the most serious harm of all, because it is the hardest to undo.
File this under “The World is More Complicated Than You Think”.
Continuing along this path, Richard Hanania claims that climate change is the world’s most overrated problem. Although I have long shared this assessment, I still found his essay on it insightful.
It’s common that when people lose a debate on the foreseeable consequences of an issue, they’ll switch to arguing about more complicated models of the world to maintain their position. For example, many dislike immigration, so they’ll pretend that it is bad for the economy. When shown this is not the case, they’ll adjust to talking about speculative worries like cultural changes over time, despite the fact that cultures always shift, and we simply lack good models to predict how this happens. They don’t consider, for example, the effects on institutions of giving populists and racists political power, which is often what advocating against immigration does, in the same way climate alarmists overlook potential nightmare scenarios that might result from disruptions involved in getting off fossil fuels.
. . .
When I say economic growth is the key to solving most of the world’s problems, a reader may imagine a chart with lines going up and wonder how this could be true. But economic growth is not some kind of accounting trick. GDP per capita is a proxy for the degree to which human beings have control over their circumstances and can adjust to novel problems. Economic development is the reason why flooding is a major threat to Pacific Islanders but not to the Dutch, and why Gulf Arabs rarely suffer from heat-related deaths. It’s why you don’t live in a cave and shouldn’t expect to go hungry if there’s a bad crop harvest this year. This is also why I’m not considering health effects of climate change in this analysis, since this is one of the countless indicators that are strongly correlated with GDP. To compare the ultimate impacts of both climate change and potential mitigation measures on GDP is enough to get a rough estimate of eventual human well-being under various scenarios.
It might be worth addressing climate change if we could do so while not harming economic growth. But if there’s a tradeoff between climate and growth, you should usually choose the latter. Something that will probably cause us to be around 10% poorer than we otherwise would be in three-quarters of a century, and which might cost more to mitigate than let happen, probably shouldn’t even rank among the top hundred problems humanity faces. Some small carbon tax might in theory be fine, but it seems that most policies being adopted today in countries that take climate change seriously are overreaching. The impacts are so far in the future, so uncertain, and so manageable in all but the most extreme worst-case scenarios, that for most practical purposes I would recommend doing very little about climate change. All of this is not even considering the potential for geoengineering, the likely growth-enhancing effects of AI, or the fact that there are sure to be benefits to a warming planet, most notably fewer cold-related deaths. As it turns out, at a global level excess cold kills more people than excess warmth by a wide margin, yet there is relatively little academic interest in quantifying the positive impacts of warming, for obvious reasons.
. . .
Climate alarmism I think should be understood as a dark sociological phenomenon. Note again that even the most pessimistic scenarios don’t actually forecast humans being worse off due to climate change. To talk about not wanting to bring children into the world because of global warming is in essence saying “life isn’t worth living if growth is 0.13 percentage points slower a year, subject to wide error bars.” Climate hysteria should itself probably be treated as a public health issue. You shouldn’t dismiss all concerns about climate change simply based on what the extremists are saying, but in this case the extremists are such ridiculous people and so prominent that it is telling that they are not regularly being denounced by supposedly more rational environmentalists.
The narrative that humans are ruining the planet and will eventually be forced to face a reckoning over their sins against Mother Earth has had a deep appeal to Westerners since the second half of the twentieth century. There used to be media hysteria about landfills and producing too much garbage, as if we were running out of space for the waste we produce. As with air pollution more generally, this challenge was largely solved in the developed world via limited regulatory action and technological solutions that became more realistic as societies got wealthier.
There is no reason to expect climate change to be any different on a global scale in a world where GDP continues to rise. Our ongoing overreaction to a warming planet is much more dangerous than the underlying problem itself. It also fundamentally represents a deep spiritual sickness.
File this under “The Future of the World Isn’t As Dire As You Think”.