“The World Won’t End” — World’s Top Climate Official Criticizes Climate Alarmism
Will it matter to Hollywood and the media?
The good people tried to warn us, but we wouldn’t listen. The comet strikes and destroys Earth.
So ends the star-packed Netflix blockbuster and climate change allegory Don’t Look Up. Sorry audiences, no happy ending for you. Director Adam McKay relished the opportunity to undermine your expectations because, according to him, climate change isn’t just a big threat. It’s “the biggest threat in the history of humankind.”
And it’s true that Earth seems poised to blow past the international community’s goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. No wonder McKay has lost sleep over the climate crisis.
Many others have lost sleep too. Climate anxiety has increased dramatically, and Hollywood continues to sound the alarm. The industry produces many movies and shows that highlight climate change, and plenty of observers demand even more climate content.
Today would-be parents wonder about the ethics behind birthing a new generation of carbon munchers, and in her children’s book Greta Thunberg, the media’s favorite child activist (now all grown up!), warns kindergarteners that they might have no future at all.
Sweet dreams, kiddos!
Hollywood and the media speak with one voice when it comes to climate change: “Good” people agree with McKay.
So what should we make of all the recent apostates from Team Good?
Kelsey Piper, writing in Vox, warned against alarmism. So did the New York Times’ Ezra Klein, and longtime New York Times environmental journalist Andrew Revkin. The latest heresy comes from the Goodest of Them All, the man who sits atop the organization that issues the world’s most important climate updates.
Recently, Jim Skea, the new chair of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), criticized those who “constantly communicate the message that we are all doomed to extinction.”
Said the British scientist, “The world won't end if it warms by more than 1.5 degrees.”
Surpassing that threshold would lead to many problems and social tensions, he said, but it wouldn’t constitute an existential threat to humanity.
Journalists revere the IPCC, and McKay seems to as well. Al Gore’s Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth first sparked McKays’ climate concerns, but it was the IPCC’s 2018 report that radicalized the director. The IPCC had a somewhat equal but opposite effect on me.
I produced for ABC News in the 2000s, and was on the climate beat for a while. I was deeply concerned about global warming, and plunged into a crash course on the IPCC.
Although I was a climate newbie in my 20s, many top climate scientists would take my calls simply due to my network affiliation. After quizzing so many scientists and reading lots of IPCC materials, I ended up in a much different place than where I began.
I still didn’t buy the arguments that manmade global warming was a hoax or that it didn’t exist. But I also learned how climate messaging goes through something like a game of telephone.
The IPCC churns out enormous reports. But since the organization knows that reporters, politicians and others probably wouldn’t read those tomes, they also release abridged “summaries for policymakers.”
The scientists I spoke with told me how relatively sober claims made in the main reports would at times grow more pointed in the summary. I witnessed it myself when I compared the reports and the summaries. The stridency may bump up again at the press release stage and journalists often add another helping of alarmism to their reports.
I never thought I’d see the day when an IPCC chair would challenge alarmism, especially as directly as Skea has. Of course, he still regards climate change as a huge threat, but compared to what?
Only after we answer that question can we think sensibly about what to do about climate change. And here again, the IPCC’s authority may get distorted.
Although top scientists from around the globe contribute to the reports, they typically only weigh in on their narrow area of expertise. Experts on, say, cloud formation, coral reefs, or (in Skea’s case) sustainable energy may know more than just about anyone on those topics, but that doesn’t necessarily make them qualified to weigh the benefits and costs of different courses of action. The world has lots of problems, and if leaders don’t prioritize them properly they’ll blow through scarce resources like time and money with little to show for it.
That’s why Bjorn Lomborg called in the experts on benefit-cost analysis. The president of the Danish think tank Copenhagen Consensus Center has collaborated with more than 100 of the world’s top economists to identify the smartest ways to fix the biggest problems in the world.
People in wealthy nations often highlight the problems climate change may cause in the future, but Lomborg notes that, “if you live in most other places on the planet, you’re worried about the fact that your kids might die of easily curable diseases tonight.”
Lomborg and his collaborators have found that the smartest approach means prioritizing challenges like tuberculosis, malaria, malnutrition, and education. Spending a paltry $35 billion per year (the equivalent to the increase in annual global spending on cosmetics over the last two years) would make the world’s poor $1.1 trillion richer while saving 4.2 million lives per year.
Skea’s original remarks come from a Der Spiegel interview that ran on July 29. He continued his line of thought in a separate exchange with the German news agency DPA, and I came across Skea’s comments via a third German news source (DW). As of this writing, I have found not a single major American news outlet that has covered it.
Let’s see how the media reacts to Skea’s heresy. Will the “good” people simply ignore it? Will they strike back? Will Skea follow up with a “clarification” of his comments?
And what about McKay? Did he read the IPCC reports or some overheated summary of the summary?
A more sober man of the left, Ezra Klein, puts climate change into perspective:
No mainstream climate models suggest a return to a world as bad as the one we had in 1950, to say nothing of 1150. Was the world so bad, for virtually the entirety of human history, that our ancestors shouldn’t have made our lives possible? If not, then nothing in our near future looks so horrible that it turns reproduction into an immoral act.
Klein’s words address young people considering parenthood, but anxious Hollywood directors would profit from them too.
Perhaps McKay could reunite Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep and the rest of the Don’t Look Up cast to tackle tuberculosis, which kills about 1.2 million poor people each year.
Now there’s a cause that could use some awareness raising from the good people in Hollywood.
Ted Balaker is a filmmaker, and former network newser and think tanker. His recent work includes Little Pink House starring Catherine Keener and Jeanne Tripplehorn, Can We Take a Joke? featuring Gilbert Gottfried and Penn Jillette, and a soon-to-be-released feature documentary based on the bestselling book, The Coddling of the American Mind, by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt.
Tradeoffs! Who'da thought?