{"id":338463,"date":"2024-08-04T11:09:28","date_gmt":"2024-08-04T09:09:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=338463"},"modified":"2024-08-04T11:09:29","modified_gmt":"2024-08-04T09:09:29","slug":"polar-bears-dead-coral-and-other-climate-fictions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=338463","title":{"rendered":"Polar Bears, Dead Coral and Other Climate\u00a0Fictions"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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From Science Matters <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By\u00a0Ron Clutz<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n

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Bjorn Lomborg calls out climate alarmist nonsense in his WSJ article Polar Bears, Dead Coral and Other Climate Fictions.<\/strong><\/a>  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Activists\u2019 tales of doom never pan out,
but they leave us poorly informed and feed bad policy.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whatever happened to polar bears?<\/strong> They used to be all climate campaigners could talk about, but now<\/strong> they\u2019re essentially absent from headlines<\/strong>. Over the past 20 years, climate activists have elevated various stories of climate catastrophe, then quietly dropped them<\/strong> without apology when the opposing evidence becomes overwhelming. The only constant is the scare tactics.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n

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Protesters used to dress up as polar bears. Al Gore\u2019s 2006 film,<\/strong> \u201cAn Inconvenient Truth,\u201d depicted a sad cartoon polar bear floating away to its death<\/strong>. The Washington Post warned in 2004<\/strong> that the species could face extinction, and the World Wildlife Fund<\/strong>\u2019s chief scientist claimed some polar bear populations would be unable to reproduce by 2012.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then in the 2010s, campaigners stopped talking about them.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

After years of misrepresentation, it finally became impossible to ignore the mountain of evidence showing<\/strong> that the global polar-bear population has increased<\/strong> substantially. Whatever negative effect climate change had was swamped by the reduction in hunting of polar bears. The population has risen from around 12,000 in the 1960s to about 26,000.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n

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The same thing has happened with\u00a0activists\u2019 outcry about Australia\u2019s Great Barrier Reef.<\/strong>\u00a0For years, they shouted that the reef was being killed off by rising sea temperatures. After a hurricane extensively damaged the reef in 2009,\u00a0official Australian estimates<\/strong>\u00a0of the percent of reef covered in coral reached a\u00a0record low in 2012.<\/strong>\u00a0The media overflowed with stories about the great reef catastrophe, and\u00a0scientists predicted<\/strong>\u00a0the coral cover would be\u00a0reduced by another half by 2022<\/strong>. The\u00a0Guardian<\/strong>\u00a0even\u00a0published an obituary in 2014.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The percentage of coral cover in the northern and central Great Barrier Reef has increased.(Supplied: Australian Institute of Marine Science)<\/strong><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The latest official statistics show a completely different picture. For the past three years the Great Barrier Reef has had\u00a0more coral cover than at any point since records began in 1986,<\/strong>\u00a0with 2024 setting a new record. This\u00a0good news gets a fraction of the coverage<\/strong>\u00a0that the panicked predictions did.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n

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More recently, green campaigners were warning that small Pacific islands would drown as sea levels rose. In 2019\u00a0United Nations Secretary-General Ant\u00f3nio Guterres<\/strong>\u00a0flew all the way to Tuvalu, in the South Pacific, for a Time magazine cover shot. Wearing a suit, he stood up to his thighs in the water behind the headline \u201cOur Sinking Planet.\u201d The accompanying article\u00a0warned the island\u2014and others like it\u2014would be struck \u201coff the map entirely\u201d by rising sea levels.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n

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Hundreds of Pacific Islands are growing, not shrinking. No habitable island got smaller.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

About a month ago, the\u00a0New York Times finally shared<\/strong>\u00a0what it called\u201csurprising\u201d climate news:<\/strong>\u00a0Almost\u00a0all atoll islands are stable or increasing in size<\/strong>. In\u00a0fact<\/strong>, scientific literature has\u00a0documented<\/strong>\u00a0this\u00a0for more than a decade<\/strong>. While rising sea levels do erode land, additional sand from old coral is washed up on low-lying shores. Extensive studies have long shown this\u00a0accretion is stronger than climate-caused erosion,<\/strong>\u00a0meaning the land area of Tuvalu and many other small islands is increasing.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n

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Today,\u00a0killer heat waves are the new climate horror story<\/strong>. In July President Biden claimed \u201cextreme heat is the No. 1 weather-related killer in the United States.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n

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He is wrong by a factor of 25. While\u00a0extreme heat kills nearly 6,000 Americans each year, cold kills 152,000<\/strong>, of which 12,000 die from extreme cold. Even including deaths from moderate heat, the toll comes to less than 10,000. Despite rising temperatures,\u00a0age-standardized extreme-heat deaths have actually declined in the U.S.<\/strong>\u00a0by almost 10% a decade and globally by even more, largely because the world is growing more prosperous. That allows more people to afford air-conditioners and other technology that protects them from the heat.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n

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My Mind is Made Up, Don\u2019t Confuse Me with the Facts. H\/T Bjorn Lomborg, WUWT<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

The petrified tone of heat-wave coverage twists policy illogically. Whether from heat or cold, the most sensible way to save people from temperature-related deaths<\/strong> would be to ensure access to cheap, reliable electricity.<\/strong> That way, it wouldn\u2019t be only the rich who could afford to keep safe from blistering or frigid weather. Unfortunately, <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Activists do the world a massive disservice by refusing to acknowledge
facts that challenge their intensely doom-ridden worldview.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is ample evidence that man-made emissions<\/strong> cause changes in climate, and climate economics generally finds that the costs of these effects outweigh the benefits. But the net result is nowhere near catastrophic.<\/strong> The costs of all the extreme policies campaigners push for are much worse.<\/strong> All told, politicians<\/strong> across the world are now spending more than $2 trillion annually<\/strong>\u2014far more than the estimated cost from climate change that these policies prevent each year.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n

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Yes, those are Trillions of US$ they are projecting to spend.<\/strong><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Scare tactics leave everyone\u2014especially young people\u2014distressed and despondent.<\/strong> Fear leads to poor policy choices<\/strong> that further frustrate the public. And the ever-changing narrative of disasters erodes public trust.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Telling half-truths while piously pretending to \u201cfollow the science\u201d benefits activists<\/strong> with their fundraising, generates clicks for media outlets, and helps climate-concerned politicians rally their bases. But it leaves all of us poorly informed and worse off.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Mr. Lomborg is<\/strong> president of the Copenhagen Consensus, a visiting fellow at Stanford University\u2019s Hoover Institution and author of \u201cBest Things First: The 12 Most Efficient Solutions for the World\u2019s Poorest and our Global SDG Promises.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

See Also:<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n
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You Won’t Survive “Sustainability” Agenda 2024<\/a><\/blockquote>