Climate Hysteria

Is climate hysteria the storm before the calm?


ADAM CREIGHTON

Global panic over climate action is not based on facts, says Barack Obama’s chief scientist



Demands to act on climate change reached fever pitch at President Joe Biden’s climate summit last month, where 40 world leaders gathered on Zoom to outdo each other in their ambitions to slash carbon dioxide emissions to achieve “net zero” by 2050.

For well over half the population, to question the urgency of “action on climate change” is to question science itself, to wish a dystopian climate carnage on mankind. “It’s the existential crisis of our times,” the President said. “The signs are unmistakeable. The science is undeniable. But the cost of inaction keeps mounting.”

Yet for New York University scientist Steven Koonin, Barack Obama’s former chief scientist, it’s anything but. The gap between rhetoric and facts has never been greater. His new book, Unsettled, released digitally this week, hasn’t lobbed a grenade so much as fired a bazooka at the climate “consensus”.

“Leaders talk about existential threat, climate emergency, disaster, crisis, but in fact when you actually read the literature, there is no support for that kind of hysteria at all,” he says. “The science is insufficient to make useful projections about how the climate will change in coming decades, much less what effect humans will have on it.”

Koonin, “increasingly dismayed” by climate alarmism, will be hard to “cancel”. He’s still alive, a self-declared Democrat, with impeccable academic and career credentials: a Caltech-trained physicist who became chief scientist at BP in 2005 and then Barack Obama’s undersecretary for science in 2009.

Yes, the planet has warmed, he concedes, and the burning of fossil fuels is partly to blame, but the impact is tiny, complex and uncertain, and occurs against a backdrop of natural climate change over thousands of years that dwarfs the recent increase in temperature.

At least half the warming since 1950 — about 0.7 degrees — is due to human influence, but it could just as easily be a quarter, climate science says.

“We are trying to understand a chaotic, multiscale system with incomplete observations, so it’s no surprise the science isn’t settled,” Koonin says. Humans affect only around 1 per cent of the world’s natural energy flows.

“We have this big system and we’re tickling it a bit,” he adds.

Since 1880, as far back as modern measurements go, global average temperature has risen haphazardly by about one degree centigrade. But it rose as rapidly between 1910 and 1940 — when emissions and the Earth’s population were tiny fractions of today’s levels — as the average temperature did over the past 30 years.

“Variations in the temperature are not at all unusual; what’s of interest is to what extent the changes are driven by humans or part of natural variation,” Koonin says, pointing out that the world’s temperature has been much higher, and much lower, in the distant past

The 1600s saw a little ice age, while the dinosaurs put up with much warmer weather.

In short, zoom in, and it looks scary; zoom out, and it’s hard to see what all the fuss is about.

Conveying the findings of climate science to the public has been akin to Chinese whispers, where the final message has been misinterpreted, exaggerated, and cherrypicked by bureaucrats, politicians and journalists, to the point it’s barely recognisable.

For instance, the latest climate science finds heatwaves are no more common than they were a century ago; the warmest temperatures in the US haven’t increased in the past 50 years.

Global wildfires have declined more than 25 per cent since 2003, and humans have had no detectable impact on the hurricanes. You’d never read that in any mainstream press.

As for the sea level, it’s been rising for 20,000 years, including by 25cm since the late 19th century — a drop in the ocean given it was 6m higher 125,000 years ago.

Even current trends indicate the sea level is rising 3mm a year, or enough to rise one metre in 333 years. Bondi is still a good long-term investment.

Climate scientists say temperatures could rise between 1.5 and 4 degrees over the next century.

What about if it rises three degrees by 2100, or twice the 2015 Paris climate change conference target?

“The net economic impact … if this happened would be minimal,” Koonin says, taking the analysis straight out of the latest UN climate change assessment.

“Even for five degrees of warming, GDP in around 2100 would be 6 or 7 per cent lower than it would otherwise be,” he explains. And even then, we would still be far richer than we are today.

Prophets of climate doom exclusively use the most unrealistic of the IPCC’s assumptions about the future, known as “RCP8.5”.

It assumes the world’s population grows to 12 billion from less than 8 billion today by 2100, and the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere triples. Never mind emissions are already falling in most advanced countries, which have promised to halve them by 2030.

Why has climate science been so twisted and obfuscated? As with COVID-19, fear sells, so news media have little interest in context or facts that might make the disaster narrative less compelling.

Secondly, “action” on climate change demands significant government intervention. Supporters of drastic climate change policies tend to also support extreme Keynesian economics and an activist welfare state.

In other words, even if apocalyptic climate forecasts turn out to be very wrong, policies to cut emission would have, conveniently for them, seen a significant growth of government.

“Do you believe in climate change?” It’s apt phraseology. No one ever asks if you understand climate change. For most people, this “belief” is little different from religious faith, taken on word from the high priests of climate change.

What’s worrying is that the advocates for drastic action to stop climate change, in the media and bureaucracy tend to be the same people who have made significant errors about COVID-19, a phenomenon that should have been much easier to forecast than the climate 100 years from now.

For all our sakes, let’s hope they aren’t so wrong about the outlook for global temperatures, given the increasing marginal cost of reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

In 1982, the head of the United Nations Environment Program forecast “an ecological catastrophe as devastating as a nuclear war”.

Nothing remotely like that has come true.

If Koonin’s less alarmist take on climate science prove mores in keeping with reality, a lot of people will be very embarrassed in coming decades. For everyone else, much poorer than they might have been, the amusement will be small consolation.


‘Leaders talk about existential threat … when you actually read the literature, there is no support for that kind of hysteria at all’
STEVEN KOONIN
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY