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Much of what people are being told about the environment, including the climate, is wrong, and we desperately need to get it right. I decided to write Apocalypse Never after getting fed up with the exaggeration, alarmism, and extremism that are the enemy of a positive, humanistic, and rational environmentalism. Every fact, claim, and argument in this book is based on the best-available science, including as assessed by the prestigious Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and other scientific bodies. Apocalypse Never
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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.24
“while many species are threatened with extinction, climate change does not threaten human extinction.”
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.
Humans today produce enough food for ten billion people, a 25 percent surplus, and experts believe we will produce even more despite climate change.
the human response to climate change as much as the risk of climate change itself.”
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.
their unanimous Hohenkammer Statement that climate change is real and humans are contributing to it significantly.69 But they also agreed that more people and property in harm’s way explained the rising cost of natural disasters, not worsening disasters.
climate change so far has not resulted in increases in the frequency or intensity of many types of extreme weather.
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.
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.
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.
“your persistent exaggeration of the facts has the potential to do more harm than good to the scientific credibility of your cause as well as to the psychological well-being of my generation.”
“Media coverage tends to emphasize the most pessimistic scenarios and in the process somehow converts them from worst-case scenarios to our most likely futures.”
‘enough horror to induce a panic attack in even the most optimistic.’
in early 2020, governments around the world scrambled to cope with an unusually deadly flu-like virus that experts say may kill millions of people.
“Richer countries are more resilient,” climate scientist Emanuel said, “so let’s focus on making people richer and more resilient.”
“We’ve got to come up with some kind of middle ground. We shouldn’t be forced to choose between growth and lifting people out of poverty and doing something for the climate.”
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.
the use of land as pasture for beef production is humankind’s single largest use of Earth’s surface.
Nearly half of Earth’s total agricultural land area is required for ruminant livestock, which includes cows, sheep, goats, and buffalo.
Amazon plants consume about 60 percent of the oxygen they produce in respiration, the biochemical process whereby they obtain energy. Microbes, which break down rainforest biomass, consume the other 40 percent. “So, in all practical terms, the net contribution of the Amazon ECOSYSTEM (not just the plants alone) to the world’s oxygen is effectively zero,”
the Amazon, and all plant life, store carbon, though not 25 percent, as the student climate activists who sued Brazil claimed, but rather 5 percent.
almost everything the news media reported in summer 2019 about the Amazon was either wrong or deeply misleading.
Against the horrifying picture painted of an Amazon forest on the verge of disappearing, a full 80 percent remains standing. Between 18 to 20 percent of the Amazon forest is still “up for grabs” (terra devoluta) and remains at risk of being deforested.
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.
plants grow faster as a result of higher carbon dioxide concentrations.
None of this is to suggest that rising carbon emissions and climate change bring no risks. They do. But we have to understand that not all of their impacts will be bad for the natural environment and human societies.
As for the myth that the Amazon provides “20 percent of the world’s oxygen,” it appears to have evolved out of a 1966 article by a Cornell University scientist. Four years later, a climatologist explained in the journal Science why there was nothing to be frightened of. “In almost all grocery lists of man’s environmental problems is found an item regarding oxygen supply. Fortunately for mankind, the supply is not vanishing as some have predicted.”74 Unfortunately, neither is the supply of environmental alarmism.
just 0.03 percent of the nine million tons of plastic waste that ends up in oceans every year is composed of straws, banning them seems like a profoundly small thing, indeed.6
“For every pound of tuna we’re taking out of the ocean, we’re putting two pounds of plastic in the ocean,”
Consumption of plastics has skyrocketed during the last several decades. Americans use ten times as much, per capita, as we did in 1960.
Fishing nets and lines account for half of all waste within the infamous Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
From the 1830s to the 1980s, one of the largest ivory processing plants in the world was in Essex, Connecticut. It processed up to 90 percent of all ivory imported into the United States.
“Plastic is a miracle product, you know? I mean, the advances in technology that also you know, help to develop. It wouldn’t be possible without plastic. I mean, I don’t want to lie about it. I’m not that hardline on it.”63
they are greatly stressed by being around people and the stress appears to make them susceptible to falling ill from some kind of bacteria that is already in their bodies.
not only deeply afraid of people, they fear each other.
cats and pigs caused the local extinction of the southern royal albatross on Auckland Island, while also preventing the species’ return.
the average annual increase in global apparent food fish consumption (3.2 percent) has outpaced population growth (1.6 percent) and exceeded consumption of meat from all terrestrial animals, combined (2.8 percent).”
are the alternatives to fossil-based plastics really better for the environment? Certainly not in terms of air pollution.
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.
While bioplastics biodegrade more quickly than fossil plastic, they are not reused as often as ordinary plastics, and they are more difficult to recycle.
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.
decomposing bioplastics often produce more air pollution than sending ordinary plastics to the landfill.
we save nature by not using it, and we avoid using it by switching to artificial substitutes.
