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

by Bjørn Lomborg

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...