{"id":343697,"date":"2024-09-19T08:32:02","date_gmt":"2024-09-19T06:32:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=343697"},"modified":"2024-09-19T08:32:04","modified_gmt":"2024-09-19T06:32:04","slug":"shrinking-island-vanishing-polar-bears-the-climate-scare-stories-that-turn-out-to-be-false","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=343697","title":{"rendered":"Shrinking island, vanishing polar bears \u2014 the climate scare stories that turn out to be false"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"
According to studies, the land mass of the island of Tuvalu is increasing — despite past concerns about it sinking due to climate change.REUTERS\/Kirsty Needham<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From New York Post<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By\u00a0Bjorn Lomborg<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Looking back on more than 20 years of climate agitation<\/a>, two themes emerge: a stubborn unwillingness by campaigners to acknowledge any inconvenient science, and ever-shifting favorite stories, first elevated and then dropped by the wayside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The one constant: a fixation on scaring the public, which has in turn shaped bad climate policies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the start of this century, the polar bear was the emblem of climate apocalypse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Protesters dressed as polar bears, while Al Gore\u2019s hit 2006 film \u201cAn Inconvenient Truth<\/em>\u201d showed us a sad, animated polar bear floating away to its death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Washington Post warned<\/a> that polar bears faced extinction, and the World Wildlife Fund\u2019s chief scientist even claimed some polar bear populations would be unable to reproduce by 2012. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then in the 2010s, campaigners just stopped talking about polar bears<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why? Because after years of misrepresentation, it finally became impossible for them to ignore a mountain of evidence showing that the global polar bear population<\/a> has increased substantially from around 12,000 in the 1960s to around 26,000 in the present day. (The main reason? People are hunting a lot less polar bears). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The same thing has happened with depictions of Australia\u2019s Great Barrier Reef.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For decades, campaigners shouted<\/a> that the reef was being killed off by rising sea temperatures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After extensive damage from a hurricane in 2009, official Australian estimates of coral cover reached a low in 2012.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The media was flooded with claims of the \u201cGreat Reef Catastrophe<\/a>\u201d and scientists predicted<\/a> the reef would be decimated by 2022. The Guardian even published an obituary<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The latest official statistics show a completely different picture. For the past three years, the Great Barrier Reef has had more coral cover<\/a> than at any point since records began in 1985, with 2024 setting a new record.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The good news gets a fraction of the coverage that the scare stories did. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

An often-recurrent climate story has been the alleged drowning of small Pacific islands due to sea level rise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2019, United Nations Secretary General Ant\u00f3nio Guterres flew all the way to Tuvalu for a Time magazine cover-shot<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wearing a suit, he stood up to his thighs in the water, demonstrating \u201cour sinking planet.\u201d The accompanying article warned the island \u2014 and others like it \u2014 would be struck \u201coff the map entirely\u201d by rising sea levels. <\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"
UN Secretary General Ant\u00f3nio Guterres on the cover of Time Magazine in June 2019.Time<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

This summer, the New York Times finally shared<\/a> what it called \u201csurprising\u201d climate news: almost all atoll islands are increasing in size. In fact, the scientific literature has documented this trend for more than a decade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While rising sea levels do erode land, additional sand from old coral is washed up on low-lying shores.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Extensive studies have long shown<\/a> this accretion is stronger than climate-caused erosion, meaning the land area of Tuvalu is increasing<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Climate change is real. It is manmade. It is a challenge that needs sensible policies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But campaigners do the cause a massive disservice by refusing to acknowledge evidence that challenges their intensely doom-ridden worldview.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All these misguided claims add up, and have shaped the climate panic that has led to politicians passing climate legislation that now costs the world more than $2 trillion annually, for a tiny benefit. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today, killer heat waves are the new scare story<\/a> \u2013 and the latest example of willful blindness of the bigger picture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Recently, President Biden claimed<\/a> \u201cextreme heat is the number one weather-related killer in the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He is wrong by a factor of 25<\/a>. While extreme heat annually kills nearly 6,000 people, cold kills 152,000 Americans each year, of which 12,000 die from extreme cold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite rising temperatures, age-standardized extreme heat deaths<\/a> have actually declined in the US<\/a> by almost 10% per decade and globally by even more, largely because people who are more prosperous are better able to afford air conditioners. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

If 6,000 heatwave deaths are a genuine priority, a sensible response would be to ensure American electricity remains cheap so it\u2019s not just the rich who can afford to keep air conditioning running.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The same policy prescription would hold if President Biden were to pay attention to the 152,000 Americans dying each year from the cold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Strokes and heart attacks spike when older people can\u2019t afford to heat their homes through winter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sadly, rather than keeping energy costs low, a lot of climate policy does the opposite.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is hard not to see a pattern of climate-alarmed campaigners scaring people witless and choosing to ignore inconvenient science for as long as they can \u2014 before simply switching to a new climate fright when it becomes too awkward not to. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But scare campaigns have consequences. They leave everyone \u2014 and especially young people \u2014 distressed and despondent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fear leads to poor policy choices, like western governments spending trillions of dollars on ineffective climate responses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And they erode the public trust, like when emphasizing heat deaths, because they fit the narrative, while ignoring much greater numbers of cold deaths. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Telling half-truths whilst piously purporting to be following the science benefits activists with their fundraising, generates clicks for media outlets, and helps politicians rally voters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it leaves all of us poorly informed and worse off. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bjorn Lomborg is President of the Copenhagen Consensus, Visiting Fellow at Stanford University\u2019s Hoover Institution, and author of \u201cFalse Alarm\u201d and \u201cBest Things First.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Looking back on more than 20 years of climate agitation, two themes emerge: a stubborn unwillingness by campaigners to acknowledge any inconvenient science, and ever-shifting favorite stories, first elevated and then dropped by the wayside.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":121246920,"featured_media":343700,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","_crdt_document":"","advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[691830646,691818056,691818251,691824179],"class_list":{"0":"post-343697","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","6":"hentry","7":"category-uncategorized","8":"tag-great-reef-catastrophe","9":"tag-climate-change","10":"tag-polar-bears","11":"tag-united-nations-un","13":"fallback-thumbnail"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/02024-rising-sea-levels-caused-89068491.webp?fit=1536%2C1024&ssl=1","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paxLW1-1rpv","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":424041,"url":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=424041","url_meta":{"origin":343697,"position":0},"title":"Polar bears on Norwegian islands fatter and healthier despite ice loss","author":"uwe.roland.gross","date":"31\/01\/2026","format":false,"excerpt":"The Norwegian Arctic Archipelago of Svalbard have become fatter and healthier despite significant sea ice loss due to climate change. 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