False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet

by Bjørn Lomborg

WE LIVE IN AN AGE OF FEAR—particularly a fear of climate change. One picture summarizes this age for me. It is of a girl holding a sign saying: YOU’LL DIE OF OLD AGE I’LL DIE OF CLIMATE CHANGE This is the message that the media is drilling into our heads: climate change is destroying our planet and threatens to kill us all.

Media outlets reinforce the extreme language by giving ample space to environmental campaigners, and by engaging in their own activism. The New York Times warns that “across the globe climate change is happening faster than scientists predicted.” The cover of Time magazine tells us: “Be worried. Be very worried.” The British newspaper the Guardian has gone further, updating its style guidelines so reporters must now use the terms “climate emergency,” “climate crisis,” or “climate breakdown.” Global warming should be “global heating.” The newspaper’s editor believes “climate change” just isn’t scary enough, arguing that it “sounds rather passive and gentle when what scientists are talking about is a catastrophe for humanity.”

Unsurprisingly, the result is that most of us are very worried. A 2016 poll found that across countries as diverse as the United Arab Emirates and Denmark, a majority of people believe that the world is getting worse, not better.

If adults are worried silly, children are terrified. A 2019 Washington Post survey showed that of American children ages thirteen to seventeen, 57 percent feel afraid about climate change, 52 percent feel angry, and 42 percent feel guilty.

Throughout all this time, I have argued that climate change is a real problem. Contrary to what you hear, the basic climate findings have remained remarkably consistent over the last twenty years. Scientists agree that global warming is mostly caused by humans, and there has been little change in the impacts they project for temperature and sea level rise.

But the conversation around me has changed dramatically in recent years. The rhetoric on climate change has become ever more extreme and less moored to the actual science.

The science shows us that fears of a climate apocalypse are unfounded. Global warming is real, but it is not the end of the world. It is a manageable problem. Yet, we now live in a world where almost half the population believes climate change will extinguish humanity. This has profoundly altered the political reality. It makes us double down on poor climate policies.

CLIMATE CHANGE IS REAL, it is caused predominately by carbon emissions from humans burning fossil fuels, and we should tackle it intelligently. But to do that, we need to stop exaggerating, stop arguing that it is now or never, and stop thinking climate is the only thing that matters.

We are being told that we must do everything right away. Conventional wisdom, repeated ad nauseam in the media, is that we have only until 2030 to solve the problem of climate change. This is what science tells us!11 But this is not what science tells us. It’s what politics tells us. This deadline came from politicians asking scientists a very specific and hypothetical question: basically, what will it take to keep climate change below an almost impossible target? Not surprisingly, the scientists responded that doing so would be almost impossible, and getting anywhere close would require enormous changes to all parts of society by 2030. Imagine a similar discussion on traffic deaths. In the United States, forty thousand people die each year in car crashes. If politicians asked scientists how to limit the number of deaths to an almost impossible target of zero, one good answer would be to set the national speed limit to three miles per hour. Nobody would die. But science is not telling us that we must have a speed limit of three miles per hour—it only informs us that if we want zero dead, one simple way to achieve that is through a nationwide, heavily enforced three-mile-per-hour speed limit. Yet, it is a political decision for all of us to make the trade-offs between low speed limits and a connected society.

WE ARE NOT on the brink of imminent extinction. In fact, quite the opposite. The rhetoric of impending doom belies an absolutely essential point: in almost every way we can measure, life on earth is better now than it was at any time in history.

Both maps simply show what everyone knows: people in the Mekong Delta literally live on the water. In South Vietnam’s An Giang province, almost all land that is not mountainous is protected by a dike. It is “underwater” in the same way that much of Holland is: large swathes of land including Schiphol, the world’s fourteenth-largest airport, are quite literally built under the high-tide mark. In London, almost a million people live below that level. But nobody in Holland, London, or the Mekong Delta needs scuba gear to get around, because humanity has adapted with dikes and flood protection.

The study shows that today, 110 million people are “underwater” regularly. In reality, almost every one of them is well protected. The real story here is the triumph of ingenuity and adaptation.12 In 2050, the study shows a global increase of 40 million people living below the high-tide mark: 150 million in total.

The scientists, who have promised to deliver “policy-relevant but not policy-prescriptive information” according to UN guidelines, obligingly said the 2.7°F goal was technically feasible but would “require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.” Simply put, politicians asked them what it would take to do the almost impossible, and the scientists responded that this would require almost impossible policies.15 Yet, the report was presented in the media as evidence that we need to make urgent, extreme carbon-emission reductions. It would be a bit like asking the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) what it would take to move the entire human population to Mars. NASA would obligingly tell us that it is technically feasible, but would require far-reaching changes to our current priorities and unprecedented investments in space technology.

The era of good feeling has ended. Global warming is now being used, often explicitly, to advance broader causes in a partisan political environment that shapes the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and much of the world. This fact goes a long way toward explaining the heightened levels of alarmism that characterize the current conversation about climate change. Up until the 2018 midterm congressional elections, climate change was deemed such a peripheral campaign issue in the US that there was not a single question about it in a general election debate. Things then changed very quickly.

A partisan gap in attitudes has been fostered by both sides. Today, people who identify as Democrats and Republicans are further apart on how much priority should be accorded to climate change than on any other single issue. Just consider that. On gun control, the economy, the minimum wage, workers’ rights, universal health care, foreign policy, immigration, and abortion, Americans are more aligned than they are on climate change.

Opposition to Trump has colored coverage of climate policy all over the world. In the wake of Trump’s election, for instance, a number of high-profile media outlets began to publish stories claiming that China was stepping up as a “leader” on climate change. A leader on climate change? China has tripled its carbon emissions since 2000 to become the world’s largest carbon emitter, and has seen its renewable energy use halve from almost 20 percent in 2000 to about 10 percent in 2020 (although it was even lower at 7.5 percent in 2011). According to official estimates, even if China implements all of its green promises, renewables will reach only 18 percent in 2040, with 76 percent of its energy use still coming from fossil fuels. Holding China up as a green leader is a false narrative that tells us more about the storytellers (and often their opposition to Trump) than it does about China.

SETTING ARTIFICIAL DEADLINES to get more attention is one of the most common tactics of climate change campaigners: if we don’t act by such-and-such day, the planet will be doomed.

In 2006, Al Gore estimated that unless drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gases were taken within ten years, the world would reach a point of no return.22 But we can go back even further. In 1989, the head of the UN Environment Program declared we had just three years to “win—or lose—the climate struggle.”

Nearly a decade earlier than that, in 1982, the UN was predicting planetary “devastation as complete, as irreversible as any nuclear holocaust” by the year 2000, due to climate change and other challenges including ozone-layer depletion, acid rain, and desertification.

During the 1970s, while global warming research dominated the scientific community, a number of high-profile researchers promoted fear of a “catastrophic” oncoming ice age. Science News had a 1975 cover showing glaciers overwhelming the New York City skyline. Time magazine published the story “Another Ice Age?” in 1974, suggesting that “telltale signs are everywhere” for cooling, and that its “effects could be extremely serious, if not catastrophic.” Even if there was no ice age, the article told us, just a small drop in temperatures would lead to crop failures, making human life unsustainable.

The fact that we’ve worried about both cooling and warming does not mean we should not worry about either. The point is that the media likes to predict impending doom, preferably with a firm date attached. And there is something about human psychology that makes us want to believe it. One of the most striking examples of this apocalyptic tendency came in 1968, when a group of academics, civil servants, and industrialists met in Rome to talk about the seemingly insoluble problems of the modern world. It was a pessimistic age: the techno-optimism of the 1950s and 1960s had given way to concern on a broad range of issues, from geopolitics (the Vietnam War) to society (the “youth rebellion”) to the economy (unemployment and stagflation). Newsweek summarized the mood with a cover showing a confused Uncle Sam gazing into an empty cornucopia, and the words “Running Out of Everything.

The Club came up with a report, The Limits to Growth, which was so influential that it was discussed in magazines from Time to Playboy, scrutinized by the commentariat, and seized upon by campaigners for radical change. The report had special appeal to the media—and apparent extra intellectual heft—because it was based on computer simulations, which were then revolutionary and ultramodern. Applying these, the scientists predicted with great confidence that gold would run out by 1979, along with a huge range of important resources that humanity depends on—aluminum, copper, lead, mercury, molybdenum, natural gas, oil, silver, tin, tungsten, and zinc would run out before 2004.27 Spoiler Alert: They were spectacularly wrong. Consider just the four most important resources. Since 1946, technology has made more copper, aluminum, iron, and zinc available than we have consumed, and commodity prices have generally fallen. Oil was supposed to run out in 1990, according to these thinkers and their computer simulations, and natural gas in 1992, but reserves for both are actually larger today than in 1970, although we consume dramatically more of each.

The Club of Rome got it wildly wrong because it overlooked the greatest resource of all: human ingenuity at adapting.

THE STORY OF the Club of Rome is important because lots of people are making exactly the same mistake now when they study and report on climate change: they are leaving out our remarkable ability for adaptation. Much of the alarmism surrounding the topic can be explained by this one fact: the stories assume that while the climate will change, nothing else will.

In real life, the 2011 paper explained, humans “adapt proactively,” and “such adaptation can greatly reduce the possible impacts.” When adaptation is taken into account, the authors showed, “the problem of environmental refugees almost disappears.” Furthermore, “the main consequence of a large rise in sea level is a larger investment in protection infrastructure” and “it is incorrect to automatically assume a global-scale population displacement owing to a large rise in sea level.” Under realistic assumptions, the number of people displaced in an extreme scenario of high sea level rise falls from 187 million to 305,000. The worst-case flooding will displace less than 1/600th of the figure in the headlines.

In his influential book The Uninhabitable Earth, journalist David Wallace-Wells states that coastal flooding caused by sea level rise will result in somewhere between $14 trillion and more than $100 trillion of damages every year by 2100. This idea has been repeated by countless climate activists. But it turns out that these figures exaggerate the problem by up to two thousand times.31 Where do the numbers come from? Wallace-Wells uses two key papers to support them. What these papers basically do is predict that sea levels will increase because of climate change over the twenty-first century, and count how many people and how much wealth in those areas will be flooded, without additional flood protection. Do you notice what’s wrong with that sentence? Yup, it’s the final four words. The headline-grabbing costs come from modeling the effects of flooding without additional flood protection. And “headline-grabbing” isn’t an exaggeration. We will come back to the extraordinarily high claim of $100+ trillion, but first let’s scrutinize the 2018 research paper that came up with the $14 trillion cost. This was helpfully shared with the world’s journalists via a press release. The figure found its way into Newsweek, Axios, Science Daily, New Scientist, and India Today. What no news stories mentioned, and indeed, what the research paper itself barely acknowledged, was that even an extremely stingy amount of spending on adaptation would reduce costs by 88 percent, and that if we ap...

In the study’s most extreme scenario (not shown in figure 1.2), 350 million people could get flooded every year by 2100, with costs reaching beyond $100 trillion, or 11 percent of global GDP. This is where Wallace-Wells got his high-end, terrifyingly large figure: the worst-case outcome of the worst-case, no-adaptation scenario. But, of course, we will adapt. As the authors of the paper put it: “Damages of this magnitude are very unlikely to be tolerated by society and adaptation will be widespread.” With realistic projections of adaptation, the number of people flooded will drop dramatically, to about fifteen thousand per year by the end of the century. Yes, dike costs will increase to $48 billion, and flood damage costs will also increase to $38 billion. But the total cost to the economy will actually decline, from 0.05 percent of GDP to 0.008 percent. And a 99.6 percent reduction in flood victims will be an undeniable victory.

The reality is that while the amount of carbon dioxide emitted has a comparatively small impact on the number of people flooded, even with the largest carbon emissions and the highest sea level rise, there will be many fewer people flooded because of adaptation, especially in a world that is richer (and the whole world is getting richer and therefore increasingly able to afford it). Even with rising seas, the most likely scenario is that in the future, fewer people will die from climate-related flooding, not more.

WE WITNESS THE SAME sloppy logic on the issue of heat waves. Let’s examine a June 2019 headline in New York magazine: “Meeting Paris Climate Goals Would Save Thousands of American Lives during Heat Waves: Study.”

A hurricane or flood hitting a sparsely populated Florida in 1900 would have done relatively little damage. Since then, the coastal population of Florida has increased sixty-seven-fold. Thus, a similar-strength hurricane or flood hitting a densely populated, wealthy Florida in 2020 leads to much higher costs. The higher cost is not because hurricanes changed, but because society changed.

The expanding bull’s-eye effect means we’re likely to see much more costly disasters happen over time, even if the climate doesn’t change at all. This does not mean that global warming has no distinct impact. But it does mean that when the media trumpets that the latest hurricane, tornado, or flood is the costliest yet, they tend to imply that the rising damage is due to climate change. In reality, much (and often all) we’re seeing is that more people with more stuff live in harm’s way.

IT IS NO WONDER that people are scared about global warming, given how the media covers it, how campaigners pound it, and how politicians get to grandstand and promise our salvation. Yes, global warming is real, and it needs our serious attention. But the endless jeremiads have warped our understanding of the issues. We need a better sense of what global warming will actually mean. Right now, we’re getting lots of irresponsible journalism that’s scaring us rather than informing us. We need to end the sensationalism and get a grip on the real size of the problem by including information on adaptation and the expanding bull’s-eye effect.

HOW MUCH, AND how quickly, will rising carbon dioxide levels affect global temperature?

MAGICC. It was developed partly with funding from the US government’s Environmental Protection Agency, and has been used by the UN’s panel of climate scientists for all of their reports.

Even if rich countries completely curtail all emissions (an impossible scenario), overall carbon dioxide content continues to rise, and the temperature continues to rise with it. So, the temperature increase is smaller, but only a tiny bit smaller. Even after eight decades, the difference is just below 0.8°F.1 Since the United States emits just over 40 percent of rich country carbon dioxide, in this scenario the effect of just the US going to zero fossil fuels from today onward would be a reduction in temperatures of about 0.33°F in 2100.

But in other ways, rising GDP actually alleviates environmental problems, because poverty is often the biggest cause of pollution. One of the deadliest environmental problems today is indoor air pollution, produced almost entirely because the world’s poorest 2.8 billion people are forced to cook and heat their houses by burning dirty fuels like wood, dung, and cardboard. Breathing this foul pollution is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes each day, and women and children are the worst affected.

The biggest environmental killer, outdoor air pollution, initially increases as incomes go up, but then it starts declining as individuals become even richer. Put simply, when immediate concerns like hunger and infectious diseases are tackled, people start demanding more environmental regulations.11 Deforestation follows the same pattern. We see vast deforestation in poor countries because there is a strong need for more development, but as countries get richer they become more likely to reforest, in part because citizens increasingly demand more biodiversity and nature.12 All of which is to say that we should not assume that rising GDP denotes only bad things for the planet. Higher GDP not only means better social and economic outcomes but also mostly better environmental outcomes.

If you look across the world (on the left-hand side of figure 2.3), people in richer countries are more satisfied with their lives. This connection doesn’t taper off as incomes rise away from absolute destitution: as the national average income doubles and doubles again, the average person is ever more satisfied. And this is true even inside each country (on the right-hand side of the figure): as incomes double, individual life satisfaction increases.

OVER THE COMING DECADES, GDP per capita is likely to go up almost everywhere. It will lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and give billions many more opportunities, from avoiding starvation to better education. It will also lead a drive toward better environmental conditions in almost all countries. As incomes go up, voters will press for less air pollution, more protected forests, and cleaner rivers. It will hugely impact global human welfare. It will give almost everyone more satisfied lives. All this is unequivocally, morally good. But, increased GDP will also drive carbon dioxide emissions higher, and that will create more warming and more problems. And herein lies the central tension within climate policy, and one I will return to again and again.

The narrative is this: global warming makes things worse, and since it touches almost everything, it makes almost everything worse. The storyline tells us that where there is more rain, the result will be floods and where there is less rain, the result will be drought. Global warming will be good for bad things and bad for good things. This is a cartoon vision of the world. In real life, most things have both good and bad consequences.

According to the conventional narrative about climate change, unless we make dramatic alterations today, animals and people will die in huge numbers, the planet will become unrecognizable, and society will disintegrate. While horrifying, this story is comforting in its simplicity. It is also wrong, mostly because it is a cartoon setup.

A campaign by environmentalists successfully convinced the US government to declare the polar bear “endangered” in 2008. However, on a global level, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which decides which animals and plants are endangered, was only willing to call the bear “vulnerable”; this had been the outcome of every evaluation except one since 1982.1 The prediction that the polar bear would suffer immensely because of a lack of summer ice was always somewhat odd. Polar bears survived through the last interglacial period 130,000 to 115,000 years ago, when it was significantly warmer than it is now. They also survived the first thousands of years of the current interglacial period, when arctic sea ice cover was strongly reduced and there were even long periods of ice-free summers in the central Arctic Ocean.

At that time, it was thought that the global population of polar bears was around 5,000 to 19,000. Hunting was regulated, and by 1981 the official estimate had increased to almost 23,000. Since then their numbers have been growing overall. The group’s latest official estimate comes from 2019, and is the biggest yet at 26,500 (see figure 3.1).4 FIGURE 3.1 Estimated number of polar bears from the main international body collecting polar bear statistics, the Polar Bear Research Group.3 Clearly, this is a conservation success that we should celebrate. Yet, given that the polar bear has been used for so long as an icon of climate change doom, this finding is actually quite embarrassing for campaigners. The result? Polar bears have been quietly dropped from the climate change narrative.

Nor did Al Gore’s follow-up 2017 film, An Inconvenient Sequel, find room to share the good news about the bear’s survival. The real threat to polar bears isn’t climate change, it’s people.

The World Wildlife Fund Living Planet Report, published in 2018, finds that exploitation (e.g., overfishing) and habitat loss (converting nature into farms and cities) are responsible for about 70 to 80 percent of all threats to species. When we look at what influences species extinction, climate change is one of the smallest factors: 5 to 12 percent. A 2016 study published in Nature similarly suggests that overexploitation, agriculture, and urban development are the most prevalent threats to species, with climate change the least important of seven factors. This means that prosaic actions would be most helpful: things like regulating fisheries and ensuring more space for nature. So, yes, if we want to save our plants and animals, we need to change our behavior. But not in the ways that climate activists will tell you.

There is nothing good about heat waves—they are dangerous and kill people. But in fact, cold weather is far more dangerous and kills more of the population. This means that as the world gets warmer many people will actually benefit. Scientists who undertook the biggest ever study of heat and cold deaths, published in Lancet in 2015, examined seventy-four million total deaths from all causes in 384 locations in thirteen countries. These included cold countries like Canada, temperate countries like Spain and South Korea, and subtropical and tropical nations like Brazil, Taiwan, and Thailand. The scientists found that heat caused almost 0.5 percent of all deaths, but more than 7 percent of all deaths were caused by cold. For every heat death, seventeen people die from the cold.

WHAT IS CLIMATE CHANGE doing to nature? Based on what we hear every day, it’s turning green pastures and forests into dust bowls. The reality is the opposite. Global warming is causing an unprecedented greening of the world, which scientists have been slow to recognize. But global greening has now been thoroughly corroborated in a number of global studies. The biggest satellite study to date, published in 2016, confirmed that over the past three decades upward of half the world’s vegetated area is getting greener, whereas only 4 percent is browning.16 The overwhelming cause of global greening is carbon dioxide fertilization. That’s right: carbon dioxide, which causes global warming, also helps plants grow—and more carbon dioxide makes them grow more.

Researchers find that global greening over the past thirty-five years has increased leaves on plants and trees equivalent in area to two times the continental United States. It is equivalent to greening the entire continent of Australia with plants or trees, two times over. It is quite remarkable that over a few decades we got the equivalent of two entire new continents of green because of carbon dioxide—and virtually nobody has heard about it.

THE SPECTER OF more wars is another rallying point of climate change activists. They argue that climate change is a key cause of the ongoing civil war in Syria, and that this war is a harbinger of things to come: warmer temperatures will mean more fighting.

A 2019 study similarly concludes: “There is very little merit to the ‘Syria climate conflict thesis.’” Senator Bernie Sanders was knocked by PolitiFact’s truth-checkers for making this very argument when he was campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2015. Yet, the narrative persists.