Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

by Michael Shellenberger

What the IPCC had actually written in its 2018 report and press release was that in order to have a good chance of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius from preindustrial times, carbon emissions needed to decline 45 percent by 2030. The IPCC did not say the world would end, nor that civilization would collapse, if temperatures rose above 1.5 degrees Celsius.

But if that’s the case, the impact is dwarfed by the 92 percent decline in the decadal death toll from natural disasters since its peak in the 1920s. In that decade, 5.4 million people died from natural disasters. In the 2010s, just 0.4 million did.28 Moreover, that decline occurred during a period when the global population nearly quadrupled.

While global sea levels rose 7.5 inches (0.19 meters) between 1901 and 2010,30 the IPCC estimates sea levels will rise as much as 2.2 feet (0.66 meters) by 2100 in its medium scenario, and by 2.7 feet (0.83 meters) in its high-end scenario.

When it comes to food production, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) concludes that crop yields will increase significantly, under a wide range of climate change scenarios.37 Humans today produce enough food for ten billion people, a 25 percent surplus, and experts believe we will produce even more despite climate change.38 Food production, the FAO finds, will depend more on access to tractors, irrigation, and fertilizer than on climate change, just as it did in the last century.

In its fourth assessment report, the IPCC projected that by 2100, the global economy would be three to six times larger than it is today, and that the costs of adapting to a high (4 degrees Celsius) temperature rise would reduce gross domestic product (GDP) just 4.5 percent.

Ninety-eight percent of people in eastern Congo rely on wood and charcoal as their primary energy for cooking. In the Congo as a whole, nine out of ten of its nearly ninety-two million people do, while just one out of five has any access to electricity.44, 45 The entire country relies on just 1,500 megawatts of electricity, which is about as much as a city of one million requires in developed nations.46

“There is robust evidence of disasters displacing people worldwide, but limited evidence that climate change or sea level rise is the direct cause.”

In fact, scientists have done that study, and two of them were Rockström’s colleagues at the Potsdam Institute. It found that food production could increase even at four to five degrees Celsius warming above preindustrial levels.64 And, again, technical improvements, such as fertilizer, irrigation, and mechanization, mattered more than climate change. The report also found, intriguingly, that climate change policies were more likely to hurt food production and worsen rural poverty than climate change itself.

Technological change significantly outweighs climate change in every single one of FAO’s scenarios.

Tech impacts more than climate change.

And it’s not just hurricanes. “There is scant evidence to indicate that hurricanes, floods, tornadoes or drought have become more frequent or intense in the U.S. or globally,” he wrote later. “In fact we are in an era of good fortune when it comes to extreme weather.”

What most determines how vulnerable various nations are to flooding depends centrally on whether they have modern water and flood control systems,

Anyone who believes climate change could kill billions of people and cause civilizations to collapse might be surprised to discover that none of the IPCC reports contain a single apocalyptic scenario. Nowhere does the IPCC describe developed nations like the United States becoming a “climate hell” resembling the Congo. Our flood-control, electricity, and road systems will keep working even under the most dire potential levels of warming.

In other words, the problems from sea level rise that Oppenheimer calls “unmanageable” are situations like the ones that already occur, from which societies recover, and to which they adapt.

Unmanageable.

As such, it’s misleading for environmental activists to invoke people like Bernadette, and the risks she faces from climate change, without acknowledging that economic development is overwhelmingly what will determine her standard of living, and the future of her children and grandchildren, not how much the climate changes.

Poverty is a bigger problem.

Before Europeans arrived in the United States, fires burned up woody biomass in forests every 10 to 20 years, preventing the accumulation of wood fuel, and fires burned the shrublands every 50 to 120 years. But during the last 100 years, the United States Forest Service (USFS) and other agencies extinguished most fires, resulting in the accumulation of wood fuel. Keeley published a paper in 2018 finding that all ignition sources of fires had declined in California except for electric power lines.

Fire and fuel increase.

Fires in Australia are similar. Greater fire damage in Australia is, as in California, due in part to greater development in fire-prone areas, and in part to the accumulation of wood fuel. One scientist estimates that there is ten times more wood fuel in Australia’s forests today than when Europeans arrived.

Australia fires.

The bottom line is that other human activities have a greater impact on the frequency and severity of forest fires than the emission of greenhouse gases.

Studies find that climate alarmism is contributing to rising anxiety and depression, particularly among children.100 In 2017, the American Psychological Association diagnosed rising eco-anxiety and called it “a chronic fear of environmental doom.”101 In September 2019, British psychologists warned of the impact on children of apocalyptic discussions of climate change. In 2020, a large national survey found that one out of five British children was having nightmares about climate change.

Children's climate anxiety.

Did the Associated Press publish that apocalyptic warning from the United Nations in June 2019? No, June 1989. And, the cataclysmic events the U.N. official predicted were for the year 2000, not 2030.

Media pushing alarmis.

The author of The Uninhabitable Earth, like other activist journalists, simply exaggerated the exaggerations.

Most energy experts believe emissions in developing nations will peak and decline, just as they did in developed nations, once they achieve a similar level of prosperity.

Can we credit thirty years of climate alarmism for these reductions in emissions? We can’t. Total emissions from energy in Europe’s largest countries, Germany, Britain, and France, peaked in the 1970s, thanks mostly to the switch from coal to natural gas and nuclear — technologies that McKibben, Thunberg, AOC, and many climate activists adamantly oppose.

And yet developed nations, particularly European ones, which grew wealthy thanks to deforestation and fossil fuels, are seeking to prevent Brazil and other tropical nations, including the Congo, from developing the same way.

The good news is that, globally, forests are returning, and fires are declining. There was a whopping 25 percent decrease in the annual area burned globally from 1998 to 2015, thanks mainly to economic growth.

Globally, new tree growth exceeded tree loss for the last thirty-five years, by an area the size of Texas and Alaska combined. An area of forest the size of Belgium, Netherlands, Switzerland, and Denmark combined grew back in Europe between 1995 and 2015.

Part of the reason the planet is greening stems from greater carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and greater planetary warming.29 Scientists find that plants grow faster as a result of higher carbon dioxide concentrations.

A major study of fifty-five temperate forests found higher growth than expected, due to higher temperatures resulting in a longer growing season, higher carbon dioxide, and other factors.32

But if we are to protect the world’s remaining old-growth forests, we’re going to need to reject environmental colonialism and support nations in their aspirations to develop.

What we today view as a pleasing natural landscape—a grassy meadow surrounded by a forest and with a river running through it—is often a landscape created by humans to hunt game seeking out drinking water.42 Using fire to create a meadow in which to slaughter animals is one of the most frequent mentions of the uses of fire by hunter-gatherers around the world.

Researchers have found that the production of beef in Brazil is at less than half of its potential, which means that the amount of land required to produce beef could be massively reduced.

The vast majority of plastic waste in the marine environment comes from land-based sources like littering, manufacturing materials, and waste associated with coastal recreational activities. The rest comes from ocean-based debris like fishing nets and lines.

Plastic waste in ocean.

The scientists seemed shocked by what they discovered: “The global weight of plastic pollution on the sea surface, from all size classes combined, is only 0.1 percent of the world annual production.”40 Even more astonishing, they found a hundred times less microplastic than they had been expecting to find.

Ocean and plastic.

In 2019, a team of scientists from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced that it had discovered that sunlight breaks down polystyrene in ocean water over a period as short as decades.

In a lab, the scientists exposed five samples of polystyrene in seawater to light from a special lamp matching the sun’s rays. What they discovered was that sunlight breaks down the polystyrene into organic carbon and carbon dioxide. The organic carbon dissolves in seawater, and the carbon dioxide enters the atmosphere. At the end of the process, the plastic is gone.

Styrofoam and sunlight.

Paper bags would need to be reused forty-three times to have a smaller impact on the environment.78 And plastic bags constitute just 0.8 percent of plastic waste in the oceans.

Recycled bags.

Glass bottles consume 170 to 250 percent more energy and emit 200 to 400 percent more carbon than plastic bottles, due mostly to the heat energy required in the manufacturing process.

Glass bottles.

A study of the life cycle of bioplastics made from sugar found higher negative respiratory health impacts, smog, acidification, carcinogens, and ozone depletion than from fossil plastics. When sugar-based bioplastics decompose, they emit more methane, a potent greenhouse gas, than fossil plastics.

Bioplastic is not necessarily better.

Plastics are made from a waste by-product of oil and gas production and thus require no additional land to be used. By contrast, switching from fossil plastics to bioplastics would require expanding farmland in the United States by 5 to 15 percent. To replace fossil plastic with corn-based bioplastic would require thirty to forty-five million acres of corn, which is equivalent to 40 percent of the entire U.S. corn harvest, or thirty million acres of switchgrass.

Bioplastic and land use.

We must overcome the instinct to see natural products as superior to artificial ones, if we are to save species like sea turtles and elephants. Consider how dangerous that instinct was in the case of tortoiseshell.

As such, artificial substitutes are necessary but not sufficient to save wildlife like the hawksbill sea turtle and African elephants. We must also find a way to train ourselves to see the artificial product as superior to the natural one.

Artificial can save natural.

Humankind is thus well-prepared to understand an important, paradoxical truth: it is only by embracing the artificial that we can save what’s natural.

For poor nations, creating the infrastructure for modern energy, sewage, and floodwater management will be a higher priority than plastic waste, just as they were for the United States and China before them.

Poor countries priorities.

The real problem is not extinction but rather the decline in animal populations and their overall habitat.

Population problems, not extinction.

Scientists estimate that between five and “tens of millions” of people have been displaced from their homes by conservationists since the creation of Yosemite National Park in California in 1864.

Yosemite Park displacing people.

In 2004, researchers with Wildlife Conservation Society found that two-thirds of the people they surveyed around Virunga Park reported having their crops eaten by baboons once a week. Significant percentages reported crop-raiding by gorillas, elephants, and buffalo.

Crop-raiding by park animals.

“Talking about conservation there felt totally wrong because the local people felt like conservation was simply a way to rob them of their resources. Talking to them about conserving gorillas was not talking to them in their own language. This reminded me of what I had read in grad school about conservation as neocolonialism.”

“And even with those species, the ecotourism opportunity is lost when there is no infrastructure, security, and economic development.”

Meanwhile, NGO efforts to promote alternatives to charcoal, such as through wood pellets and special stoves, have failed.

“Now I see that it might not be a lost cause, but in many places, conservation is the last priority. You have to be careful what situations you try to conserve.

Conservation isn't a priority for locals.

Plumptre worries that the management of Virunga Park by foreigners will weaken local support.