Code Red for Humanity!

It's a core principle of left-wing movements that tend toward totalitarianism, as most do, to create a perpetual atmosphere of crisis. If the movement is out of power, the crisis destabilizes the government in power, and if the movement itself controls the government crises afford ample opportunities to consolidate and expand their control.

Both the Covid pandemic and climate change have perhaps been hyped into crises for this very reason.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) just released its latest climate report, and the analysis in many quarters has been apocalyptic.

Bjorn Lomborg, author most recently of False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet, has a piece at The New York Post in which he derides the attempt to create a sense of crisis from a report that actually offers pretty meager grounds for it. He writes that,

[T]he always-breathless Guardian literally summarized this scientific report as finding mankind “guilty as hell” of “climate crimes of humanity.” (Needless to say, the report never says any such things.)

UN Secretary-General António Guterres called the findings a “code red for humanity,” saying we can only avert catastrophe by acting in the next couple of months. Of course, the United Nations has a long history of claiming catastrophe is right around the corner:

The first UN environment director claimed half a century ago that we had just 10 years left, and the then-head of the IPCC insisted in 2007 that we had just five years left.

In contrast to the hyperventilating media, the report is actually serious and sensible (and very, very long). It doesn’t surprise, since it is a summary of already-published studies, yet it reconfirms that global warming indeed is real and a problem.

The earth is indeed gradually warming and according to an op-ed at The Wall Street Journal by theoretical physicist Steven Koonin, author of the 2021 book Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters, the IPCC report predicts that the mean global temperature will be about 1.5 degrees higher in 2100 than it is today, an increase that will have minimal economic impact.

Koonin also notes that the IPCC report was less balanced than it might've been. For example,

The summary of the most recent U.S. government climate report...said heat waves across the U.S. have become more frequent since 1960, but neglected to mention that the body of the report shows they are no more common today than they were in 1900.

The Summary for Policy Makers section [of the report] says the rate of global sea-level rise has been increasing over the past 50 years. It doesn’t mention that it was increasing almost as rapidly 90 years ago before decreasing strongly for 40 years.

Lomborg culls this interesting nugget from the report:

Since the heat dome in June, there has been a lot of writing about more heat deaths. And the IPCC confirms that climate change indeed has increased heatwaves.

However, the report equally firmly, if virtually unacknowledged, tells us that global warming means “the frequency and intensity of cold extremes have decreased.”

This matters because globally, many more people die from cold than from heat. A new study in the highly respected journal Lancet shows that about half a million people die from heat per year, but 4.5 million people die from cold.

As temperatures have increased over the past two decades, that has caused an extra 116,000 heat deaths each year. This, of course, fits the narrative and is what we have heard over and over again. But it turns out that because global warming has also reduced cold waves, we now see 283,000 fewer cold deaths.

Another thing we haven't heard much from our media about is that warmer winters mean less heating fuel being burned and thus less CO2 being spewed into the atmosphere.

Anyway, here are a couple of other points from Lomborg's column:

Likewise, we have heard a lot about flooding in Germany and elsewhere being caused by climate change. But the new UN report tells us it has “low confidence in the human influence on the changes in high river flows on the global scale” — and low confidence in attributing “changes in the probability or magnitude of flood events.”

The report tells us that the evidence isn’t there to say floods are caused or driven by climate change. You don’t hear this, but so far climate change saves 166,000 lives each year.

It also mentions climate upsides like the fact that more CO₂ in the atmosphere has acted as a fertilizer and created a profound global greening of the planet. One NASA study found that over a period of 35 years, climate change has added an area of green equivalent to twice the size of the continental United States.

But don’t expect to read about this in any of the breathless articles on climate impact.

Lomborg goes on to argue that the calamity scenarios always assume that human beings will be frozen in place in the face of impending disaster and unable or unwilling to adapt to the changing conditions, but this, of course, is nonsense.

I recall that in the 1970s we were told that we were reaching "peak oil" and that the supply was running out. Then we developed fracking technology, and the "crisis" passed.

We were told that world population would far outstrip food supply by the 1990s and that we'd be overwhelmed with famine or plague or both, but the population "bomb" never materialized, and the "crisis" passed.

We were told that the need for paper would soon outstrip supply, making it extremely costly, but then computers came along, followed by the internet, the need for paper dropped precipitously, and the "crisis" passed.

We were told, too, that photographic film would become prohibitively expensive because it used silver which was becoming increasingly scarce. Then people developed digital photography which doesn't use film, and the crisis passed.

With climate change we're told that melting of the polar ice will be disastrous but aside from requiring humans to cope with rising sea levels it's hard to see why. Would the net effect of melting Greenland's ice be a detriment or a benefit? Certainly it would open a vast expanse of territory for human habitation and resource exploitation.

Is that not a good thing? Has anyone studied this?

Instead of playing Chicken Little over climate change perhaps we should first consider all the consequences, or at least those we can reasonably foresee, and stop making crises out of things that aren't a crisis.

After all, this world presents us with enough genuine worries without people inventing more.

Lomborg closes his article with this:

[T]he scare stories on climate impacts are vastly overblown and not supported by this new climate report. One of the clearest ways to see this is through climate economics. Because of climate change, the average person worldwide will be “only” 436 percent as well off in 2100 as they are now, instead of 450 percent.

I think our descendants can live with that.