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

by Bjørn Lomborg

One possible catastrophe that people often bring up is the complete melting of the Greenland ice sheet. If it happened within a lifetime, that would be catastrophic. However, the UN climate panel finds that even with a very large amount of heat, it will take a millennium or more to melt all of Greenland’s ice. Studies indicate that even in the absence of climate policy, 60 to 70 percent of the Greenland ice sheet would be around in a thousand years. And if temperatures went back down over the next centuries, it is likely much of Greenland would regrow. That is why a 2019 study by Professor Nordhaus shows that even in a worst-case, high-temperature scenario, the increased melting of Greenland would have a rather trivial impact by the end of the century, at 0.012 percent of GDP.