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

by Bjørn Lomborg

More importantly, we should be very careful in assigning blame for war to any aspect of the climate. In a recent 2019 study, researchers examined sixteen different factors that drive the risk of conflict. When the scientists ranked that list in terms of influence, climate came in fourteenth, behind far more important factors like poor development, population pressure, and corruption. The scientists concluded: “Other drivers, such as low socioeconomic development and low capabilities of the state, are judged to be substantially more influential, and the mechanisms of climate-conflict linkages remain a key uncertainty.”

Just to be clear, global warming will in total have a negative impact on our planet and well-being, so overall, there will be more bad than good impacts to describe. But the overarching narrative that insists on telling us only the bad stories is unlikely to give us adequate information with which to act smartly. It’s important to get the whole picture.

As a general rule, I will base findings on what the United Nations’ climate scientists—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC—have found. Their reports are generally considered the gold standard, since their work is careful and robust, written by large teams of top scientists from around the world.

But in their last major global-level report, the UN’s climate scientists didn’t find that to be true. They said, “There is low confidence in a global-scale observed trend in drought.” They found that since 1950 drought had likely increased in the Mediterranean and West Africa, but had likely decreased in central North America and northwest Australia. In other words, on a planetary level, the earth isn’t experiencing more drought.

Moreover, the UN scientists found—and this may be very surprising—that the purported link between man-caused climate change and drought is actually weak: “There is low confidence in attributing changes in drought over global land areas since the mid-20th century to human influence.”

But what about drought in the future? The UN’s climate scientists find, with a medium level of confidence, that if carbon emissions increase drastically (indeed, at a level that would be unrealistic), then it is likely that the risk of drought could increase in already dry regions toward the end of the century.

LEONARDO DICAPRIO’S 2016 climate change documentary was called Before the Flood. Rolling Stone published a 2019 article on climate change called “How to Survive a Flooded World.” In the same year, the New York Times declared: “Flooding Offers a Preview of Future Climate Havoc.”11 Unlike DiCaprio and the media, when the world’s best scientists worked together to examine evidence linking flooding and climate change, they could not find enough proof to even determine whether flooding was getting better or worse. The United Nations has carefully estimated the total amount of flooding around the world and found that it’s not clear whether it is even getting more or less frequent, much less if there is a human fingerprint involved.

In the future, the incidence of heavy rain will increase and there will be an expansion of areas that experience significant increases in runoff, which can increase the hazard of flooding, but the UN’s scientists emphasize that “trends in floods are strongly influenced by changes in river management.” This tells us there are far more important levers we could look at to reduce flooding than carbon cuts.

It is true that inflation-adjusted total flood costs in the United States on average rose from $3.5 billion in 1903 to $12.8 billion in 2018. By 2018, the annual cost of US flooding was 370 percent of what it used to be in 1903. But the number of housing units in the US has increased much, much more: by 2017, there were 750 percent as many housing units to be damaged as there had been in 1903.

However, we should not confuse the rising costs of flooding with flooding itself (or indeed with climate change). It is entirely caused by more houses and more wealth; in fact, the cost compared to the US national income has declined almost tenfold. If we want to reduce this amount even more, the solution isn’t to be found in radically reducing carbon dioxide levels. The solution is to stop building lots of big, expensive houses in flood zones.

Perhaps because images of fire are so frightening, or because fire can leap up with apparent randomness, or because (particularly in California) flames have subsumed the homes of the very affluent, wildfires have become one of the most potent political symbols of global temperatures run amok.18 The real story bears little resemblance to such alarmist storytelling. To begin with, over the past 150 years our exposure to fire has dropped dramatically. The examination of sedimentary charcoal records spanning six continents and two millennia shows that in fact global burning has declined sharply since 1870. To a large extent, this is because of the so-called pyric transition when humans largely stopped burning wood at home and started burning fossil fuels in power plants and cars.

There is plenty of evidence for a reduction in the level of devastation caused by fire, with satellites showing a 25 percent reduction globally in burned area just over the past eighteen years.

Recently, scientists undertook a global simulation and found that the area burned for crops and pasture has increased globally since 1900. However, the amount of burning of undisturbed land, and of land that was previously disturbed but is recovering, has declined more. Overall, that has had the effect of reducing the total annual burned area by a third.

A 2017 study found that where humans are present, climate is less important in determining fire activity. It found that significant human presence—such as closeness to towns and roads, the number of people living in an area, and the amount of land developed—can “override, or swamp out, the effect of climate.”

We should take wildfires seriously: global warming will increase the risk of wildfire (though in this century not to the levels mankind experienced prior to the middle of the twentieth century). Compared to the year 2000, an unrealistic worst-case, high-warming trend would increase the burned area globally by 8 percent in 2050 and 33 percent in 2100; but even in 2100 this would still be less than the area burned in 1950.27 For high-risk California, global warming by itself will increase the median burned area by 10 to 15 percent by the middle of the century, compared to 2000. But this increase is small in relation to the 50 percent increase in the number of houses in the highest-hazard zone over the same period.

HURRICANES, SCIENTIFICALLY KNOWN as tropical cyclones, are the costliest weather catastrophes. The costs of US landfalling hurricanes since 1980 alone amount to two-thirds of entire global catastrophic weather losses over that period. Hurricanes Katrina (2005), Sandy (2012), Harvey (2017), Irma (2017), Florence (2018), and Dorian (2019) have all been used to argue that global warming is making extreme weather worse. But this is not what the peer-reviewed science says.29 The UN’s climate scientists looked at the evidence and concluded that globally, hurricanes are not getting more frequent: they find “no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency.” They do find an increase in storms in the North Atlantic, but link this to air pollution. They specifically say that there is low confidence in attributing changes in hurricane activity to human influence.

Moreover, a new 2018 study reveals that continental US landfalling hurricanes show no trend in frequency or intensity; in fact, to the extent there is one, the trend is slightly (though statistically insignificantly) declining. This is true not only for all hurricanes, but also for the worst ones, at category 3 and up.

Looking to the future, the UN’s climate scientists find that the best but weak evidence suggests that hurricanes will become fewer but more intense. These stronger hurricanes will likely create more damage, meaning they will result in more costly damages. But as the population keeps growing and the number of houses close to coastlines increases (it is projected to more than double this century), demographic changes will increase damages much more, swamping the impact of climate change.

At 7.2°F in 2100, climate change would cause negative impacts equivalent to a 2.9 percent loss to global GDP.

One broad study done for the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) predicts that by midcentury, climate change will reduce global crop output by just a fraction of one percent of today’s output. By 2080, in a worst-case scenario, production of cereals (including wheat, rice, maize, barley, oats, sorghum, and quinoa) will be 2.2 percent lower than it would be without climate change. So grain production will still increase overall, just by less than it could have done. The FAO expects an increase in global cereal production of 44 percent without global warming, and this study shows the increase might be reduced to 41 percent by global warming.

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.

Another serious concern often raised is ocean acidification. The cost of ocean acidification is not included in any of the computer models that create estimates of the costs of global warming. The basic problem comes from the earth’s oceans taking up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, making them more acidic. Acidification hurts marine organisms that build their shells and skeletons from calcium carbonate.

WE HAVE FOLLOWED the UN’s overview of the costs of climate change impacts across different temperatures, and used the best estimate from Professor Nordhaus, and we have even added 25 percent to that. This has given us the best available estimate of the total costs of climate change at about 4 percent of GDP by 2100. This estimate is actually larger than the one provided by the 2018 UN climate panel report—the report that everyone uses to argue that we have a deadline of 2030 to act to prevent climate change. This report estimates that if we do nothing, the cost of global warming will reach 2.6 percent of global GDP by 2100.219

The economists’ work is comprehensive and, in the case of Professor Nordhaus, deserving of the Nobel economics prize. But it is obvious that predicting a cost centuries into the future with exactitude is impossible. What is most important is that while the cost may end up at 3.5, 4.0, or 4.5 percent in 2100, it’s unlikely to be 0.01 percent or 45 percent of GDP.

The last decade has seen more focus on climate change than ever before. Yet despite this, we are not achieving anything. In a surprisingly honest review of climate policies, the United Nations revealed that the last decade of climate policies has achieved a sum total of nothing.

The RGGI, or “Reggie,” is a carbon-trading marketplace covering the northeastern United States. It is just one of many around the world, but the first and biggest in the US.

The UK’s former chief climate science advisor, the late David MacKay, once wrote of carbon-cutting efforts: “Don’t be distracted by the myth that ‘every little helps.’ If everyone does a little, we’ll achieve only a little.”

I’ve been a vegetarian for ethical reasons since I was eleven, and I believe everyone should make up their own minds about whether or not they eat meat. But we should be honest about what it will achieve.

Regardless, the numbers remain massive exaggerations: vegans don’t eliminate 50 percent of their personal emissions, and vegetarians don’t cut 20 to 35 percent of theirs. They cut only that percentage of their food-related emissions. And food-related emissions represent only a small fraction of an individual’s total emissions.

So if you’re living in a rich country, going entirely vegetarian for the rest of your life will reduce your total personal emissions by about 2 percent. You could achieve a similar emissions reduction by eating anything you want and paying $1.50 each year on the RGGI trading system.

Across the world, an electric car with a reasonably long range will on average emit twenty-six tons over its lifetime. So, switching from a gasoline-powered car emitting thirty-four tons of carbon dioxide to a comparable electric car that emits twenty-six tons doesn’t eliminate emissions; it cuts them by 24 percent, leaving more than three-quarters in place.

The average subsidy spent on electric cars globally is about $10,000 per car. Each car saves eight tons of carbon dioxide over its lifetime, a reduction you could buy on the RGGI market for just $48.26

Even if every single one of the 4.5 billion people getting on any flight this year stayed on the ground, and the same happened every year until 2100, the rise in temperatures would be reduced by just 0.05°F, equivalent to delaying climate change by less than one year by 2100.30

Instead of telling people not to fly on airplanes, we should focus on the carbon efficiency of those airplanes. Adaptation is already occurring: each new generation of aircraft is on average 20 percent more fuel efficient than the model it replaces. Over the next decade, airlines will invest $1.3 trillion in new planes.

THE NEXT TIME you read about the actions you “should” take to help the planet, consider if it is just another case of “if everyone does a little, we’ll achieve only a little.” The truth is that most of our personal actions can have only a tiny impact. Let me be clear: I’m not saying that you shouldn’t think carefully about your own personal choices. There are solid reasons why any of us might choose to change our diets, drive a smaller car, and reduce the carbon footprint we leave on the planet. But climate change shouldn’t be the major consideration, because the effect of such choices is so limited.

Governments around the world spend more than $140 billion every year subsidizing inefficient solar energy and wind power. Yet despite this huge expenditure, together these renewable sources provide only about one percent of global energy needs.

WE ARE CONSTANTLY being told that renewables like solar and wind are just about to take over the world. This is almost entirely wishful thinking. One of the foremost climate campaigners, Jim Hansen, puts it best: “Suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy.” Bear in mind that Dr. Hansen is the climate scientist who initiated public concern on global warming when he testified to Congress back in 1988, and he was former vice president Al Gore’s climate advisor.

When most people talk about renewables, they typically think of solar and wind energy. These are the “new” renewables. But globally, 85 percent of all renewable energy comes from wood and hydropower, what we can call “old” renewables. These old sources have the benefit of providing power when we need it. In contrast, solar and wind power can’t be turned on when needed.

The sheer scale of battery storage capacity that would be needed for solar power to work is vastly underappreciated: today the United States has enough batteries across the entire nation to store just fourteen seconds of average US electricity use.5 These fundamental economic and technological challenges are why no big nation in the world is anywhere close to seeing new renewable energy do more than nibble at the edges of energy consumption. This is clear when you look at the share of renewable electricity from all sources in the US. Wind power produced less than 7 percent of US electricity in 2018, and solar power less than 2 percent. In total, renewable energy sources produced 17 percent of the United States’ electricity, but most of this came from old renewables, with the majority coming from reliable hydroelectricity.

When we hear politicians vowing to deliver “100 percent renewable energy” by 2030 or 2050, look at figure 7.1. We could call it the “narwhale chart”—it shows that such ideas are unmoored by historical reality or common sense.

The jarring fact is that humanity just finished spending two centuries getting rid of renewable energy and replacing it with fossil fuels (see figure 7.2). When everyone was poor, the whole world cooked and kept warm using polluting renewable energy sources like wood and dung. Over a century and a half, we shed our reliance on renewable energy and powered the industrial revolution with fossil fuels. For the last fifty years, the level of renewables globally has hardly budged from a level of around 13–14 percent. This reality mostly reflects the continued reliance of the world’s worst-off on wood and dung.

But why can’t we solve the poor world’s energy poverty problem with solar panels and wind turbines? This is in fact what many development organizations and green energy companies claim to be doing. Their claims do not add up. To see how the benefits of green energy sources like solar and wind power are being massively oversold, we should look to the poor Indian village of Dharnai, which became India’s first solar-powered community. The citizens had for years unsuccessfully tried to get connected to the national electric power grid, which mostly is supplied by coal-fired power plants. Along came a green benefactor. In 2014 under the slogan “Energy access simplified,” Greenpeace supplied Dharnai with a solar-powered “micro-grid”—an electric grid that’s not connected to the central grid. Greenpeace proudly declared that “Dharnai refused to give into the trap of the fossil fuel industry.” The world’s media reported excitedly on the “first village in India where all aspects of life are powered by solar.”12 Greenpeace had the best of intentions. But intentions don’t count for much in development. The day the electricity was turned on, the batteries were drained of power within a few hours. A boy from Dharnai remembers wanting to do his homework early in the morning before leaving to work in the fields, but there wasn’t enough power for the family’s one lamp. Because solar power is way too weak to power a stove, the citizens now had maybe a lamp illuminating the kitchen, but they...

Solar panels do deliver some benefits, allowing you to charge your cell phone and run a light at night. But they don’t deliver benefits that help drive development.

Overall, fossil fuels have declined only slightly as a share of German energy. In the first decade of the new millennium, the fossil fuel share of the overall energy supply dropped somewhat from 84 to 80 percent. But in the years since the Energiewende was passed in 2010, the fossil fuel share has stayed almost constant, inching down just one percentage point to 79 percent today.

In the larger European Union, renewable energy sources have since the turn of the century increased from 6 to 14 percent in 2018. But there’s a catch. Most of this renewable energy does not come from solar and wind. In total, solar and wind make up 2.7 percent of all energy, whereas biomass makes up more than 10 percent. Biomass, which basically is a fancy-sounding name for wood, is one of the old, reliable renewables that can produce energy when it is needed. The problem for the planet is that wood is often imported from US forests in diesel-driven ships, and emits more carbon dioxide than even coal when it is burned. Biomass is categorized by the EU only as carbon dioxide free because it is hoped that felled trees will be replanted and over many future decades will soak up as much carbon dioxide as was released by its burning. Needless to say, this is dubious accounting at best.

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to get around the fact that climate policies are expensive. What do campaigners and politicians do? They either downplay the cost, or far more dangerously, maneuver to make it appear that there will actually be a net benefit. If we change from dirty fossil fuels to clean renewable sources, they claim, we will not only solve the climate crisis but unlock jobs, savings, competitiveness, and improved well-being.

Claiming that climate policy is not only good for climate but also will actually make everyone rich is a comforting bedside story. But it is flat-out wrong. Every serious report shows extraordinarily large costs from climate policy, simply because changing the energy infrastructure that has underpinned the last two centuries of economic growth will be very, very costly.

If the European Union sticks to its climate promises for 2050, it alone could end up paying more than $2.5 trillion per year in climate costs—10 percent of its entire GDP. This is more than all the EU’s current spending on education, health, environment, housing, defense, police, and courts. It is inconceivable that such spending will go unchallenged.

The most prominent, nonpartisan research program that looks at the findings from a large number of energy-economic models is the Energy Modeling Forum (EMF) based at Stanford University. The EMF has conducted more than thirty such studies and is considered the gold standard of energy-economic modeling. Using multiple studies, mostly from the EMF, we can estimate the cost of the most expensive promises made under the Paris Agreement: those made by the United States, the European Union, China, and Mexico. Together, these commitments make up about 80 percent of the total promised carbon reductions.

The EU promised to cut its emissions by 2030 by 40 percent compared to its emissions in 1990. There is no official estimate of the cost, but the EMF finds across seven models that reducing emissions by 40 percent in 2030 (as a pit stop toward an 80 percent reduction in 2050) leads to a GDP loss of 1.6 percent in 2030, or $322 billion.