Everything is a crisis these days. If you watch the news, there are multiple crises: a health care crisis, a financial crisis, a transportation crisis, a supply chain crisis, a justice crisis, an immigration border crisis. Another crisis has been making its rounds in the news: the climate change crisis. Last week, the United Nations finished its global climate change summit in Glasgow, Scotland (COP26). Representatives from nearly 200 nations signed a new treaty. The signatories promise to keep global warming below 1.5ºC by 2100. Some of the more prominent ideas to maintain this ceiling that were brought up at COP26 are net-zero emissions by mid-century, cutting methane by 30 percent by 2030, reducing deforestation, and a coal phase-down.
Part of where I take issue with such summits as the COP26 is the crisis mentality. I am not saying that crises never exist, that global temperatures are not increasing, or that human activity has not played any notable role in shifts in climate. What I take issue with is perceived magnitude of the problem. The word "crisis" comes from the Latin crisis (judgement, critical stage), which was borrowed from the Greek krísis (one of the meanings being "turning point"). Are we really at such a critical juncture that if we do nothing, the world will end up going to hell in a hand basket? No, not particularly. I am not going to cover every last point in the climate change debates both because I do not have the time and because I have covered the topic of climate change on this blog before. What I will provide today are a few reasons why I am not flipping out about climate change:
1. Going above 1.5ºC by 2100 would not be the end of the world. What happens if we do nothing? The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] report can provide some insight. If we have a no-policy response and the global temperature rises to 3.66ºC, there is an estimated GDP loss of 2.6 percent (Ch. 3., p. 256). While 2.6 percent lesser growth sounds undesirable, also keep in mind that current projections show that the global economy is supposed to grow anywhere from 600 percent to 1,800 percent compared to 2017 (Leimbach et al., 2017). While it is hard to predict that far out in the future (see Point #3), it is a reasonable assumption that economic and technological progress will get better over time (see Point #4).
2. Weather-related deaths have been on the decline. You would think that with the increase of CO2 over the past century, more people would be dying from weather-related deaths. Yet here is a peer-reviewed paper from European scholars that says otherwise (Formetta and Feyen, 2019): "Results show a clear decreasing trend in both human and economic vulnerability, with global average mortality and economic loss rates that have dropped by 6.5 and nearly 5 times, respectively, from 1980-1989 to 2007-2016." Looking at a more longitudinal view of time, global death risk from extreme weather declined 99 percent between 1920 and 2020 (Lomberg, 2020).
3. Climate change modeling is difficult and fraught with assumptions. Hearing that the world is going to end if we do not change our behavior on environmental policy and climate change is nothing new. At least since the first Earth Day in 1970, we have been bombarded with "gloom-and-doom" predictions about how the world is going to end in the near future if we do not do something about the environment right now. And guess what? They have not come to pass. Sometimes, I feel as if climate change doomsayers are like a cult leader trying to predict the coming of the Apocalypse. When it does not come, they simply say, "Oh, I really meant later." And yet we continue to listen to such apocalyptic predictions.
Again, I am not saying that there are no problems related to the climate or that humans do not contribute to these problems. What I am saying is that climate change modeling is difficult. Look at budgetary and economic modeling five to ten years down the road. We do our best, but looking that far down the road is difficult. It is not because economists are stupid or because modeling is inherently problematic. It is because modeling is only as good as its assumptions. It is hard enough to make certain assumptions with medium-term budgetary or economic predictions. The pandemic should have quelled our assumptions on that front, that we can have such foresight. All the more so with climate change modeling.
You are talking about a longer time span and more variables to consider with climate change modeling fifty or one hundred years down the road. Plus, there is a complexity predicting long-term patterns such as interactions between clouds and oceans, solar activity, physics, and how much human activity contributes to the climate change. If you need a more technical piece on the difficulty of predicting climate change scenarios, here is one from professors at the University of Colorado and University of British Columbia published in Issues in Science and Technology. But for argument's sake, let's forget the history of climate change predictions for a moment and assume that the models are at least somewhat accurate. This does not mitigate my final point below....
4. Technological development will help us mitigate climate change. Even with this pandemic, there is still technological development. Such technological developments have helped us in the past. As we progress, innovation provides both greater wealth and improved technological capabilities. HVAC systems have gotten better over time, which can help fight temperature-related deaths. Better infrastructure development improves resilience in hurricanes, tornadoes, and flooding. Weather-related deaths have dropped in no small part because we as a species have learned how to adapt to our surrounding. I would take an educated guess that both economic growth and innovation in relevant sectors would lead to even greater resilience to climate change over time.
Postscript
I am not saying shifts in climate are not going to have any impact. There are going to be some regions hit harder than others. This, to be sure, will be based on such factors as economic development, natural resources, and geography. But I do not see it as an imminent crisis that is going to destroy us all without some drastic action. Climate change is manageable if we approach it at a more level-headed mindset. Look at what happened with the COVID-19 pandemic when we resorted to panic. Before the pandemic, experts told us that lockdowns were ill-advised. But when fear took over, we locked down because of scary modeling, even though the public health experts previously told us it was a bad idea. At least now we have data to show that lockdowns do not work to lower excess deaths. In addition to lockdowns, governments implemented a whole series of regulations and practices "in the name of science" that do little to nothing to curb COVID transmission. This inanity caused billions of dollars in economic damage, considerable unemployment, a lot of mental health problems, disrupted supply chains, and greater world hunger.
I hope the pandemic response is a lesson for those who would like to use heavy-handed government as a response. Whether we are talking about carbon taxes, cap-and-trade, investments in renewable energy so we can gradually transition away from fossil fuels, or any other policy alternative, the question we should ask ourselves is whether the cost of the policy is greater than the damage we are looking to avoid. But a first good step is understanding the extent of the problem. As I brought up before in a previous piece, catastrophic climate change projections rely on such improbable, worst-case assumptions as complete inaction, an unrealistic consumption of coal, and a lack of technological development (also see Pielke and Ritchie, 2021; and Hausfather and Peters, 2020 on how climate change activists cling on improbable, worst-case scenarios). If we put ourselves in a crisis mindset when the problem is in fact a manageable one, I will not be surprised if the attempts of world leaders to mitigate climate change will be more harmful than climate change itself.
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