Looking back at more than two decades of climate protest, two themes emerge: activists' stubborn refusal to acknowledge inconvenient science and an ever-changing set of pet stories that are first highlighted and then pushed aside.
The only thing that hasn't changed is their obsession with scaring the public, which in turn has shaped bad climate policy.
At the beginning of this century, polar bears were a symbol of the climate apocalypse.
Protesters dressed as polar bears and sang the lyrics to Al Gore's 2006 hit film “An inconvenient truth” depicts a sad-looking polar bear drifting towards death.
of The Washington Post warns Polar bears are endangered, and the World Wildlife Fund's chief scientist has even claimed that some polar bear populations will be unable to reproduce by 2012.
Then in the 2010s, activists stopped talking about polar bears.
Why? After years of misrepresentations, they finally World Polar Bear Population The population has increased dramatically, from around 12,000 in the 1960s to around 26,000 today. (The main reason? A lot fewer people are hunting polar bears than they used to.)
The same thing happens in depictions of Australia's Great Barrier Reef.
For decades, The activists shouted Coral reefs are dying due to rising sea temperatures.
Following the devastating 2009 hurricanes, Australia's official coral cover estimates hit an all-time low in 2012.
The media said,Great Reef Catastrophe” and Scientists predicted By 2022, the coral reefs will be completely destroyed. The Guardian Posted an obituary.
The latest official figures paint a very different picture. Over the past three years, the Great Barrier Reef has Increased coral cover It's the most since records began in 1985 and will set a new record in 2024.
Good news gets very little coverage compared to fear-mongering news.
A common climate story is that rising sea levels will submerge small Pacific islands.
In 2019, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres flew to Tuvalu Time magazine cover photo.
He suited up and waded up to his thighs in water to demonstrate the “Sinking Earth,” and an accompanying article warned that the island and others like it would be “completely wiped off the map” as sea levels rose.
This summer, The New York Times finally The report presents “alarming” climate news: nearly all atoll islands are expanding in size — a trend that has actually been documented in the scientific literature for over a decade.
Rising sea levels are eroding land while also washing sand from old coral onto lower-lying shorelines.
Widespread Research has been going on for a long time. This deposition is more powerful than climatic erosion, and the land area is Tuvalu is on the rise.
Climate change is real. It is man-made and it is a challenge that requires smart policies.
But activists are doing the movement great harm by refusing to acknowledge evidence that challenges their deeply pessimistic worldview.
These false claims have accumulated to create climate panic, leading politicians to pass climate legislation that will cost the world more than $2 trillion a year for little profit.
Today there is a deadly heat wave New horror stories This is the latest example of willful ignorance of the bigger picture.
recently, President Biden “Extreme heat is the number one cause of weather-related deaths in the United States.”
he 25 times wrongWhile extreme heat kills about 6,000 people each year, cold weather kills 152,000 Americans each year, including 12,000 deaths from extreme cold.
Despite rising temperatures, the age-standardized number of heatstroke deaths is actually Declining in the United States It's increased by almost 10% per decade, and even more worldwide, mainly because wealthier people can now afford air conditioning.
If 6,000 deaths from heat waves were truly a priority, a sensible response would be to ensure that electricity prices in America remain cheap so that it isn't just the rich who can run their air conditioners.
The same policy prescriptions would apply if President Biden focused on the 152,000 Americans who die from the cold each year.
When seniors can't afford to heat their homes in the winter, strokes and heart attacks soar.
Unfortunately, far from keeping energy costs down, many climate policies have had the opposite effect.
It's hard not to see a pattern in which climate activists fear people, ignore the bad science for as long as possible, and then, once that becomes too tiresome, simply switch to fearing a new climate crisis.
But fear-mongering campaigns have consequences: they make everyone, especially young people, feel anxious and discouraged.
Fear leads to poor policy choices, such as Western governments spending trillions of dollars on ineffective climate change measures.
And they undermine public trust, for example, when they highlight heatstroke deaths, which fits the narrative but ignores the far more numerous cold-related deaths.
Telling half-truths while piously claiming to follow the science helps activists raise funds, generates clicks for the media, and helps politicians rally voters.
But it makes us all less informed and makes the situation worse.
Bjorn Lomborg is chairman of the Copenhagen Consensus, visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and author of False Alarm and Best Things First.
