Exaggerated headlines, wild speculation and outright fabrications about climate do little to enlighten the reading public, and antagonise critical thinkers.
There are several reasons why climate alarmism does not sit well with classical liberals.
One is the implied imperative of costly state intervention and central planning to ‘mitigate’ climate change.
Activists insist that ‘capitalism’, an economic paradigm they poorly understand in the first place, is to blame, and that ‘eco-socialism’ is the solution.
If you tell a classical liberal that socialism is the solution, you’ve lost them, no matter how eloquent or well-supported the rest of your argument is. No matter how just the cause, socialism always fails.
By necessity, it leads to authoritarian, corrupt governments that are unable to furnish people with the necessities of a comfortable, prosperous life that the free market once provided.
‘The science’
A second reason lies in a fundamentally different view of ‘the science’ and its relationship to politics and economics. To liberals, there is no such thing as ‘the science’. Science is a method, not a body of dogma.
More importantly, liberals have a fundamental suspicion of government by scientists or experts. Scientists may have an excellent understanding of their specialist fields, but they are not well-versed in making policy, or the politico-socio-economic context in which policy is made.
They may know what needs to be done in pursuit of their own scientific concerns, but have little grasp of the trade-offs that this would require, or how to evaluate whether those trade-offs are tolerable. They live in ivory towers, usually on the government’s dime, with a limited grasp of real-world economics outside their university campuses. That’s a reason so many of them never outgrow their socialist instincts.
Scientists do not make good rulers. The Soviet Union was a technocracy in which scientific and engineering experts directed the means of production on behalf of the proletariat. In the mid-1980s, shortly before its final economic collapse, 86% of the members of the politburo were engineers. Those same ruling engineers caused the Chernobyl disaster.
Temper the hubris
A third reason is that there are many inconsistencies in the over-arching climate change narrative, and many reasons to temper the hubris of declaring projections of future climate as ‘fact’ or ‘consensus science’.
On the contrary, there are numerous reasons for caution in interpreting the output of models that try to simulate the largest, most complex set of physical systems that scientists have ever attempted to simulate.
These systems are not only large and complex and incompletely represented in data, but are coupled non-linear chaotic systems in which even small errors in the input data, or small errors in the model transformations themselves, can produce large variability in the output.
Even without rejecting all the claims of climate scientists out of hand, it is not unreasonable to maintain a healthy skepticism about the validity and accuracy of projections almost a century into the future, as one of the examples further down will demonstrate.
We cannot hope to comprehend the technological capabilities of humanity 80 years from now. We cannot even accurately model the impact of our interventions. And yet we’re proposing to meddle with their climate?
Mitigation or adaptation?
A fourth reason is that if we accept that climate change is real, is in part caused by human activity, and is likely to have substantial negative effects that overwhelm the potential positive consequences, much depends on the nature of the policy response to climate change.
Rapid decarbonisation of electricity systems, for example, has made electricity in Denmark the most expensive in the world – four times as high as the Eskom bulk household rate about which we complain all day.
Other leaders in renewable energy, such as Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, Ireland, the UK, Spain and Sweden, all have electricity prices in the top 20 in the world. California’s largely ‘green’ electricity is a third more expensive than the US average.
If this is what is asked of citizens, they certainly ought to have a say in how their governments respond to anticipated climate change, especially when they, in the case of South Africa, face world-record unemployment and a poverty rate of 55%.
One might expect reasonable people to differ, for example, on the choice between mitigation, which involves high expense upfront, and adaptation, which chooses not to constrain economic growth with costly mitigation projects, so as to enable the country to become sufficiently prosperous to cope with the vicissitudes of climate, whether they are anthropogenic or natural.
Media coverage
A fifth reason for skepticism lies in the media coverage that climate change gets. It consists of a never-ending ringing of alarm bells, which some alarmists are happy to claim is deliberate and necessary.
Lest I be accused of cherry-picking, climate coverage is a highly organised activity. Many newspapers (like the Associated Press) have received funding from environmental lobby groups or philanthropic organisations that comes with climate strings attached. They claim (as the AP does) that they retain complete editorial control, but whether or not, and how frequently, to cover climate stories is an editorial decision that they’ve just sold to the green lobby.
Just a couple of days ago, I was invited to join Covering Climate Now, which bills itself as ‘the world’s largest media collaborative’. ‘We believe climate is a story for every beat, and our goal is to support journalists and newsrooms to make that a reality’, they said. I don’t believe that.
Arctic sea ice
Earlier this week, the New York Times wanted us to know that Arctic Summer Could Be Practically Sea-Ice-Free by the 2030s (paywalled, archived copy). This is, they claim, ‘a decade sooner than expected’.
Except it wasn’t a decade sooner than expected. In 2020, National Geographic told us Arctic summer sea ice could disappear ‘as early as 2035’.
As early as?
Back in 2007, the BBC reported that scientists had warned the Arctic could be ice-free ‘by 2013’. Not only that, but it quoted the chief prognosticator, Wieslaw Maslowski, saying that because its model didn’t include the latest data, ‘you can argue that may be our projection of 2013 is already too conservative.’
When Al Gore made that projection famous in 2009, Maslowski (according to a Reuters fact-check) denied that he ever said that. The fact-check, published in 2021 in response to ridicule of Gore’s claim, claimed that Gore had ‘misrepresented data’, which is quite unfair on the world’s most pre-eminent climate fear-monger.
Back in 2009, the very same Reuters quoted a different scientist, Warwick Vincent, making the same 2013 prediction. He added: ‘2013 is starting to look as though it is a lot more reasonable as a prediction. But each year we’ve been wrong – each year we’re finding that it’s a little bit faster than expected’.
Again, an ice-free summer by 2013, but we’re probably being too optimistic.
Later that year, Reuters quoted yet another scientist, David Barber: ‘The multiyear ice covering the Arctic Ocean has effectively vanished’.
Two years later, the original scientist, Maslowski, revised his prediction, and said ‘summer sea ice will probably be gone in this decade’.
Patent lie
When 2013 rolled around and the Arctic still had plenty sea ice in summer, a fourth scientist, Peter Wadhams, told the media the Arctic would be ice-free ‘in two years’.
It wasn’t.
So the idea that the 2030s would be ‘sooner than expected’ is a patent lie. It was expected a decade ago. Now they’re saying it’s a decade in the future. Why would anyone believe this, when at least four different Arctic sea ice experts with immaculate credentials have been so spectacularly wrong for so long?
None of these stories ever address the elephant in the room, either. All offer up charts that go back to 1979. But the satellite record actually goes back to the very early 1970s. This image from the very first IPCC Assessment Report in 1990 shows that Arctic sea ice was at a minimum in 1974, before rising to a peak in 1979. (More on this here and here.)
By showing only data since 1979, these charts deliberately mislead readers into believing that the trend has been downwards ever since measurements began. It hasn’t.
The inability to make reasonably accurate projections of a single system over a relatively short period of time also reinforces grave doubt of the ability of the scientific community to project the behaviour of many inter-connected climate systems much further into the future.
Biofuels
On the same day that the New York Times warned about ice-free Arctic summers by the 2030s, it also ran an article on The Climate Solution That’s Horrible for the Climate (paywalled, archived copy).
For decades, we were told that biofuels like ethanol were an answer to the net emissions of the transport industry. The logic goes that growing plants absorb carbon dioxide from the air, which, when emitted from engine exhausts, would be roughly climate neutral.
Countries around the world mandated ethanol to be added to ordinary petrol. Countries around the world showered tax-funded subsidies upon farmers who grew predominantly maize for the production of biofuel.
Now, we’re told what the skeptics have been saying all along: diverting cropland to the production of biofuels causes food inflation, increases hunger, and actually exacerbates environmental problems by using vast amounts of land as well as fossil fuels to produce a relatively small amount of biofuel.
How can we trust reporting on climate change solutions when they supported this lunatic special-interest-enrichment scheme all these years? How many other supposed solutions serve only to enrich investors in ‘green technology’ and ‘green energy’, without achieving any of their claimed goals of climate mitigation or environmental harm reduction?
Wildfires
Climate change is already making parts of America uninsurable, reads another headline. In particular, wildfires are causing ‘rapidly growing catastrophe exposure’.
Blaming wildfires on climate change, however, is nonsense. There is no detectable trend in the extent of global wildfires. In fact, some datasets show a decreasing trend.
Of course, the value of the properties people put in the way of natural disasters is rising fast, which makes them harder to insure.
More notable, however, is that the primary cause of wildfires in California, which is where the article focuses, is not climate, but the state’s major electricity utility, Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E). Of 23 fires assessed in 2018, 17 were caused by power lines or equipment owned by PG&E, including the most catastrophic of them all, the Camp Fire of November 2018.
The utility – which has a far too cosy relationship with the state government – has been skimping on maintenance, and even failed to use a federal grant to bury electrical lines in high-wind areas, with the result that corrosion and foreseeable accidents have been starting fires left, right and centre.
Blaming California’s wildfires on climate change would be like blaming South Africa’s energy crisis on climate change. Climate has nothing to do with it: lack of maintenance, monopolistic greed and cronyism is all that’s needed for disaster to strike.
News articles that blame climate change not only cover for the entirely predictable failures of governments and companies, but they cast doubt on all the other articles that blame this or that phenomenon on climate change.
Disingenuous reporting
Remember a few years ago we were destroying the Great Barrier Reef because of climate change? Now, coral cover is ‘at record levels’. And still they tell us it is at risk of disappearing.
It is this kind of disingenuous reporting that undermines all faith in the climate change narrative driven by the media.
This is why classical liberals, and anyone sensible, really, should be very reluctant to support legislation, regulation or taxes that impose costs on the economy only in order to mitigate climate change.
Alarmism sells newspapers, but it is hard to reach any conclusion other than that the problem is being wildly exaggerated.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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