How justified is climate-change alarmism?

For decades, the picture of Earth’s future – as laid out by journalists and climate scientists alike – has been bleak. By 2070 we will see famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us, melted icecaps, flooding, extreme hurricanes and ever-present tropical storms. “Vast swathes” of the planet will be inhospitable for human life. And Greta Thunberg, in her late sixties, will wear a gas mask as she sits on the steps of Swedish Parliament with a cardboard sign declaring, “I told you so.”

Advocates have poured gasoline on the climate-alarmism fire earnestly, backed by reports declaring, “There really is no serious scientific debate remaining about climate change.” At the behest of the Al Gores of the world, the United States has spent $166 billion between 1993 and 2012 to mitigate our effect on the planet. Former president Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act allocated another $132 billion toward climate-change reduction, clean energy and environmental protection. While the total climate-change expenditure is hazy, it has cost several times more than the entire Apollo program. Americans want to know what their money has done and why the government thinks the spending is necessary.

The Department of Energy recently released a 151-page review on what current data shows about the effects of greenhouse-gas emissions and how this data compares to the conventional story surrounding climate change. This report joins a list of others challenging Biden-era orthodoxy, including the gender-dysphoria-treatment report and the Make America Healthy Again report, commissioned and released by new department administrators.

The DoE report finds that while long-term global warming exists, it has been weaker than expected, and we do not know how much of it is due to human-generated greenhouse-gas emissions. The report also argues that higher levels of carbon dioxide are good for plants: it increases their water-efficiency and photosynthesis and is beneficial for plants such as rice, wheat and barley. The authors reevaluate humans’ influence on the carbon cycle and take a skeptical stance toward claims that electric-vehicle mandates effectively and substantially reduce carbon emissions.  

Influencing the carbon cycle is, it turns out, more difficult than simply buying a hybrid and taking cold showers. One of the report’s contributors, Ross McKitrick, a University of Guelph professor specializing in environmental econometrics, told The Spectator, “The carbon cycle is very, very large and many times larger than human emissions of greenhouse gases. And so any adjustment that we make to our emissions is just changing a tiny little margin of the flows of carbon in and out of the biosphere and the atmosphere and the oceans and the ground.”

The report questions how effective international treaties are that require countries to meet emissions targets by set deadlines. For example, it references research by Dr. Tom Wigley, who modeled the effect of the Kyoto Protocol and found that the results in emission reductions were negligible. The Kyoto Protocol was the first legally binding commitment that required industrialized countries to reduce their CO2 emissions by varying percentages. Though it cost the US billions, “the result is you hardly notice a difference after 100 years,” McKitrick said. All the Kyoto Protocol would accomplish, he explained, is to delay the CO2 levels the world would have reached in 2100 to 2105.

The fundamental problem of policy designed to negate climate change, he said, is that to do anything that stops CO2 levels from rising is too costly to warrant it. McKitrick and his coauthors did some routine calculations with motor-vehicle emissions and found that even if the government removed every vehicle from the road, the change would not have the effect on the climate promised by the EV mandate’s designers.

The European Union, South Korea, Japan and other nations have committed to achieving effectively net-zero fossil-fuel use by 2050. “Look at all the ways that fossil fuels are involved in the modern economy, and immediately it’s apparent that that’s just not going to work,” McKitrick said. The only way net zero would become realistic, he explained, would be if someone invented a way to burn gasoline or use fossil fuels without releasing CO2. “In the absence of that technology, though, to build a net zero means no fossil-fuel use, and that’s just not realistic,” he said.

Dr. Steven Koonin, another contributor to the report and former DoE advisor to President Obama, said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change‘s R6 report from 2023 contains quantitative and qualitative misunderstandings about extreme weather events and rising sea levels. These misunderstandings have inflamed climate alarmism.

Extreme weather is not getting more extreme, Koonin said. “There’s a table in there in the back of the [R6] report, certainly not in the front of it, which shows about 30 different kinds of extreme weather events: droughts, floods, storms, et cetera. And the table says whether we have seen a trend in that particular event, and almost all of the entries in the table are blank. And the IPCC cannot find an observable trend in almost all kinds of weather events,” he said.

Koonin also addressed environmentalists’ concern over rising sea levels. From NASA’s 30-year record of satellite measurements, global sea levels have increased on average three millimeters a year, which is a foot a century. “This is not a catastrophe,” Koonin said. We have adapted to that kind of rise easily over the last century or so.”

For the last 20 years, the rise has accelerated, but there were comparable accelerations in the 1930s, when human greenhouse-gas emissions were much smaller, Koonin said, adding, “So again, sea level rise – not a catastrophe.”

Though the DoE report largely points at what climate scientists don’t have conclusions on, Koonin confirmed, “I think we know for sure that increased CO2 exerts a warming influence on the planet.” One major uncertainty comes from feedbacks, which are secondary effects of global warming. “If it weren’t for feedbacks, it would be about a degree. Not much to worry about at all. But it’s these feedbacks that we don’t understand that create the uncertainty. So that gives me some sense that we’re certainly having some influence on the climate, at least as far as the temperature goes,” Koonin said. The report concludes with the need for “more nuanced and evidence-based” climate science to accurately inform climate policy.

He has a message for climate debaters on both sides of the aisle: “Stop using the words ‘existential crisis,’ ‘catastrophe,’” Koonin urged. “The science does not support that.” And if you’re a skeptic of climate policy, “I would say stop using the words ‘hoax’ and ‘conspiracy.’ Climate change is not everything, but it’s not nothing.” 

So is environmentalist rage justified? The short answer is probably not, at its present levels. But if I were Greta, I would be seething too if I grew up believing my generation was destined to death by fossil fuels, when I could have had a normal, guilt-free, press-free childhood. Perhaps we can give that to the Earth-lovers who come after her.