Apocalypse Never

How the Left's New Lies About Climate Change Hurt People and Nature

Michael Shellenberger

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780063001701
• Topic: Biowissenschaften
• Subtopic: Globale Erwärmung & Klimawandel

Now a National Bestseller!

Climate change is real but it's not the end of the world. It is not even our most serious environmental problem.

Michael Shellenberger has been fighting for a greener planet for decades. He helped save the world's last unprotected redwoods. He co-created the predecessor to today's Green New Deal. And he led a successful effort by climate scientists and activists to keep nuclear plants operating, preventing a spike of emissions.

But in 2019, as some claimed "billions of people are going to die, " contributing to rising anxiety, including among adolescents, Shellenberger decided that, as a lifelong environmental activist, leading energy expert, and father of a teenage daughter, he needed to speak out to separate science from fiction.

Despite decades of news media attention, many remain ignorant of basic facts. Carbon emissions peaked and have been declining in most developed nations for over a decade. Deaths from extreme weather, even in poor nations, declined 80 percent over the last four decades. And the risk of Earth warming to very high temperatures is increasingly unlikely thanks to slowing population growth and abundant natural gas.

Curiously, the people who are the most alarmist about the problems also tend to oppose the obvious solutions.

What's really behind the rise of apocalyptic environmentalism? There are powerful financial interests. There are desires for status and power. But most of all there is a desire among supposedly secular people for transcendence. This spiritual impulse can be natural and healthy. But in preaching fear without love, and guilt without redemption, the new religion is failing to satisfy our deepest psychological and existential needs.

1

It’s Not the End of the World

1. The End Is Nigh

If you scanned the websites of two of the world’s most read newspapers on October 7, 2018, you might have feared the end of the world was near. A headline in The New York Times said: “Major Climate Report Describes a Strong Risk of Crisis as Early as 2040.” Just below the bold headline was a photograph of a six-year-old boy playing with a dead animal’s bones.¹ Said another headline in The Washington Post on the very same day: “The World Has Just Over a Decade to Get Climate Change Under Control, U.N. Scientists Say.”²

Those stories in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other media outlets around the world were based on a special report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is a United Nations body of 195 scientists and other members from around the globe responsible for assessing science related to climate change.

Two more IPCC reports would follow in 2019, both of which warned of similarly dire consequences: worsening natural disasters, sea-level rise, desertification, and land degradation. Moderate warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius would cause “long-lasting or irreversible” harm, they said, and climate change might devastate food production and landscapes. The New York Times reported that planetary warming threatens to worsen resource scarcity, and “floods, drought, storms and other types of extreme weather threaten to disrupt, and over time shrink, the global food supply.”³

A NASA scientist predicted simultaneous collapses of food systems on multiple continents at once. “The potential risk of multi-breadbasket failure is increasing,” she told The New York Times. “All of these things are happening at the same time.”

An IPCC report on climate change and land in August 2019, prepared by more than a hundred experts from fifty-two countries, warned that “the window to address the threat is closing rapidly,” and that “soil is being lost between ten and one hundred times faster than it is forming.”⁴

Farmers will not be able to grow enough food to support the human population, scientists warned. “It’s difficult to see how we could accommodate eight billion people or maybe even half of that,” an agronomist said.⁵

“We can adapt to this problem up to a point,” said Princeton University’s Michael Oppenheimer, an IPCC contributor. “But that point is determined by how strongly we mitigate greenhouse-gas emissions.” If emissions rise through 2050, then sea level rise will likely exceed 2 feet 9 inches by 2100, at which point “the job will be too big. . . . It will be an unmanageable problem.”⁶

Too much warming could trigger a series of irreversible tipping points, experts said. For example, sea level rise could be slowing the circulation of water in the Atlantic Ocean, which could change surface temperatures.⁷ Arctic permafrost covering an area nearly the size of Australia could thaw and release 1,400 gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere.⁸ The glacier on the continent of Antarctica could collapse into the ocean. If that happens, sea level could rise thirteen feet.⁹

Rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are changing the chemistry of oceans in ways that scientists warn could harm marine life and even cause mass extinctions. A 2016 study published in Nature found that higher carbon dioxide levels were making coral reef fish species oblivious to predators.¹⁰

Many blamed climate change for wildfires that ravaged California. The death toll from fires skyrocketed from just one death from wildfires in 2013 to one hundred deaths in 2018. Of the twenty most destructive fires in California’s history, half have occurred since 2015.¹¹ Today, California’s fire season stretches two to three months longer than it was fifty years ago.¹² Climate change is increasing droughts and making trees vulnerable to disease and infestation.

“The reason these wildfires have worsened is because of climate change,” said Leonardo DiCaprio.¹³ “This is what climate change looks like,” said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.¹⁴ “It’s the end of California as we know it,” concluded a columnist for The New York Times.¹⁵

In Australia, more than 135 bushfires burned in early 2020, claiming the lives of thirty-four people, killing an estimated one billion animals, and damaging or completely destroying nearly three thousand homes.¹⁶

David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth, warned that with a two degree increase, “the ice sheets will begin their collapse, 400 million more people will suffer from water scarcity, major cities in the equatorial band of the planet will become unlivable, and even in the northern latitudes heat waves will kill thousands each summer.”¹⁷

“What we’re playing for now is to see if we can limit climate change to the point where we don’t wipe out civilizations,” said environmental writer and climate activist Bill McKibben. “And at the moment we’re headed in a direction where that won’t happen.”¹⁸

Said one IPCC contributor, “In some parts of the world, national borders will become irrelevant. . . . You can set up a wall to try to contain ten thousand and twenty thousand, one million people, but not ten million.”¹⁹

“Around the year 2030, in ten years, 250 days, and ten hours, we will be in a position where we set off an irreversible chain reaction beyond human control that will most likely lead to the end of our civilisation as we know it,” said student climate activist Greta Thunberg, in 2019. “I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic.”²⁰

2. Resilience Rising

In early 2019, newly elected twenty-nine-year-old congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sat down for an interview with a correspondent for The Atlantic. AOC, as she is known, made the case for a Green New Deal, one that would address poverty and social inequality in addition to climate change. AOC pushed back against critics who claimed it would be too expensive. “The world is going to end in twelve years if we don’t address climate change,” she said, “and your biggest issue is how are we gonna pay for it?”²¹

The next day, a reporter for the news website Axios called several climate scientists to get their reactions to AOC’s claim that the world was going to end in twelve years. “All the time-limited frames are bullshit,” said Gavin Schmidt, a NASA climate scientist. “Nothing special happens when the ‘carbon budget’ runs out or we pass whatever temperature target you care about, instead the costs of emissions steadily rise.”²²

Andrea Dutton, a paleoclimate researcher at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, said, “For some reason the media latched onto the twelve years (2030), presumably because they thought that it helped to get across the message of how quickly we are approaching this and hence how urgently we need action. Unfortunately, this has led to a complete mischaracterization of what the report said.” ²³

What the IPCC had actually written in its 2018 report and press release was that in order to have a good chance of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius from preindustrial times, carbon emissions needed to decline 45 percent by 2030. The IPCC did not say the world would end, nor that civilization would collapse, if temperatures rose above 1.5 degrees Celsius.²⁴

Scientists had a similarly negative reaction to the extreme claims made by Extinction Rebellion. Stanford University atmospheric scientist Ken Caldeira, one of the first scientists to raise the alarm about ocean acidification, stressed that “while many species are threatened with extinction, climate change does not threaten human extinction.”²⁵ MIT climate scientist Kerry Emanuel told me, “I don’t have much patience for the apocalypse criers. I don’t think it’s helpful to describe it as an apocalypse.”²⁶

An AOC spokesperson told Axios, “We can quibble about the phraseology, whether it’s existential or cataclysmic.” But, he added, “We’re seeing lots of [climate change–related] problems that are already impacting lives.”²⁷

But if that’s the case, the impact is dwarfed by the 92 percent decline in the decadal death toll from natural disasters since its peak in the 1920s. In that decade, 5.4 million people died from natural disasters. In the 2010s, just 0.4 million did.²⁸ Moreover, that decline occurred during a period when the global population nearly quadrupled.

In fact, both rich and poor societies have become far less vulnerable to extreme weather events in recent decades. In 2019, the journal Global Environmental Change published a major study that found death rates and economic damage dropped by 80 to 90 percent during the last four decades, from the 1980s to the present.²⁹

While global sea levels rose 7.5 inches (0.19 meters) between 1901 and 2010,³⁰ the IPCC estimates sea levels will rise as much as 2.2 feet (0.66 meters) by 2100 in its medium scenario, and by 2.7 feet (0.83 meters) in its high-end scenario. Even if these predictions prove to be significant underestimates, the slow pace of sea level rise will likely allow societies ample time for adaptation.

We have good examples of successful adaptation to sea level rise. The Netherlands, for instance, became a wealthy nation despite having one-third of its landmass below sea level, including areas a full seven meters below sea level, as a result of the gradual sinking of its landscapes.³¹

And today, our capability for modifying environments is far greater than ever before. Dutch experts today are already working with the government of Bangladesh to prepare for rising sea levels.³²

What about fires? Dr. Jon Keeley, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist in California who has researched the topic for forty years, told me, “We’ve looked at the history of climate and fire throughout the whole state, and through much of the state, particularly the western...