Major newspaper commentaries call climate-change alarm unwise and unnecessary
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8006
High-visibility cautions against alarm over human-caused climate disruption appeared over the weekend in the Washington Post, where Bjørn Lomborg argued against blaming climate change for extreme weather, and in the Wall Street Journal, which published Matt Ridley’s piece “Dialing back the alarm on climate change: A forthcoming report points [sic] lowers estimates on global warming.”
Most of the context for the commentaries is the forthcoming report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But some of the context is to be found in a September special supplement to the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s announcement of that report, in a Washington Post editorial about it, and in a recent New York Times Science Times front-page analysis of the imminent IPCC report.
Unlike the two commentaries, these sources promote concern, and even alarm, rather than cautioning against it.
With the title “Explaining extreme events of 2012 from a climate perspective,” the special supplement reports on “19 analyses by 18 different research groups, often using quite different methodologies, of 12 extreme events that occurred in 2012.” A passage in the final chapter acknowledges that “there is a danger in drawing too strong a conclusion” from that small sample, but then emphasizes, “That said, approximately half of the analyses found some evidence that anthropogenic climate change was a contributing factor to the extreme event examined, though the effects of natural fluctuations of weather and climate on the evolution of many of the extreme events played key roles as well.” NOAA’s announcement carried the headline “New analyses find evidence of human-caused climate change in half of the 12 extreme weather and climate events analyzed from 2012.”
The Washington Post editorial “The dangerous effects of global warming” found in the special supplement’s “knowns and unknowns” reasons “why humans shouldn’t just adapt but head off excessive future warming by reducing greenhouse-gas emissions now.” The Times‘s 10 September Science Times front-page analysis by Justin Gillis proposed that in the leaked IPCC draft, which is still subject to change, the panel “seems to be bending over backward to be scientifically conservative.”
The Post identifies Lomborg as an adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School who directs the Copenhagen Consensus Center and has written widely about global warming. Lomborg’s commentary cites the imminent IPCC report, Scientific American, a special 2011 IPCC report on extreme weather, the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (though, oddly, not the special supplement), and Nature.
Global warming is “partly man-made,” Lomborg stipulates. “It will make some things worse and some things better. Overall, the long-run impact will be negative. But some of the most prominent examples of extreme weather are misleading, and some weather events are becoming less extreme.” He quotes Gavin Schmidt of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, a founder and leading voice at the blog RealClimate:
General statements about extremes are almost nowhere to be found in the literature but seem to abound in the popular media. It’s this popular perception that global warming means all extremes have to increase all the time, even though if anyone thinks about that for 10 seconds they realize that’s nonsense.
Lomborg argues that the planet can probably expect more heavy rain, but less water scarcity; stronger hurricanes, but fewer of them; more heat waves, but fewer cold waves. And since cold is more lethal than heat, he predicts that “fewer people will die from cold and heat in the future.” He sums up:
It is understandable that a lot of well-meaning people, wanting stronger action on global warming, have tried to use the meme of extreme weather to draw attention. But alarmism and panic are rarely the best way to achieve good policies. The argument that global warming generally creates more extreme weather needs to be retired.
The WSJ identifies Ridley as the author of The Rational Optimist and a member of the British House of Lords. Ridley’s commentary cites the imminent IPCC report, its 2007 predecessor, Nature Geoscience, the Journal of the American Meteorological Society, the journal Earth System Dynamics, and Nature Climate Change.
Concerning part of the imminent IPCC report, Ridley writes:
There have already been leaks from this 31-page document, which summarizes 1,914 pages of scientific discussion, but thanks to a senior climate scientist, I have had a glimpse of the key prediction at the heart of the document. The big news is that, for the first time since these reports started coming out in 1990, the new one dials back the alarm. It states that the temperature rise we can expect as a result of man-made emissions of carbon dioxide is lower than the IPPC thought in 2007.
He calls this a “retreat” and says that it matters “because it points to the very real possibility that, over the next several generations, the overall effect of climate change will be positive for humankind and the planet.” He explains why he believes the report “is effectively saying ... that there is a better than 50-50 chance that by 2083, the benefits of climate change will still outweigh the harm.”
Like Lomborg, Ridley emphasizes predictions that much of the warming will occur in cold areas and at night and that it would “cut winter deaths (which far exceed summer deaths in most places).” He says also that it “would extend the range of farming further north, improve crop yields, slightly increase rainfall (especially in arid areas) [and] enhance forest growth.” Moreover, increased CO2, Ridley predicts, will boost agriculture and green the Earth.
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.