Bjorn Lomborg - False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet

WE LIVE IN AN AGE OF FEARparticularly a fear of climate change. One picture summarizes this age for me. It is of a girl holding a sign saying:

Y OULL DIE OF OLD AGE I LL DIE OF CLIMATE CHANGE

This is the message that the media is drilling into our heads: climate change is destroying our planet and threatens to kill us all. The language is of apocalypse. News outlets refer to the planets imminent incineration and analysts suggest that global warming could make humanity extinct in a few decades. Recently, the media has informed us that humanity has just a decade left to rescue the planet, making 2030 the deadline to save civilization. And therefore we must radically transform every major economy to end fossil fuel use, reduce carbon emissions to zero, and establish a totally renewable basis for all economic activity.

Children live in fear and line the streets in protest. Activists are cordoning off cities and airports to raise awareness that the entire population of the planet is facing slaughter, death, and starvation.

Influential books reinforce this understanding. In 2017, journalist David Wallace-Wells wrote a lengthy and terrifying description of global warming impacts for New York magazine. Although the article was generally panned by scientists as exaggerated and misleading, he went on to publish the same argument in book form in The Uninhabitable Earth, which became a bestseller. The book revels in unabashed alarmism: It is worse, much worse, than you think. Likewise, in his 2019 book, Falter,

Media outlets reinforce the extreme language by giving ample space to environmental campaigners, and by engaging in their own activism. The New York Times warns that across the globe climate change is happening faster than scientists predicted. The cover of Time magazine tells us: Be worried. Be very worried. The British newspaper the Guardian has gone further, updating its style guidelines so reporters must now use the terms climate emergency, climate crisis, or climate breakdown. Global warming should be global heating. The newspapers editor believes climate change just isnt scary enough, arguing that it sounds rather passive and gentle when what scientists are talking about is a catastrophe for humanity.

Unsurprisingly, the result is that most of us are very worried. A 2016 poll found that across countries as diverse as the United Arab Emirates and Denmark, a majority of people believe that the world is getting worse, not better. In the United Kingdom and the United States, two of the most prosperous countries on the planet, an astonishing 65 percent of people are pessimistic about the future. A 2019 poll found that almost half of the worlds population believes climate change likely will end the human race. In the United States, four of ten people believe global warming will lead to mankinds extinction.

There are real consequences to this fear. People are deciding, for instance, not to bring children into the world. One woman told a journalist: I know that humans are hard-wired to procreate, but my instinct now is to shield my children from the horrors of the future by not bringing them to the world. The media reinforce this choice; the Nation wants to know:

If adults are worried silly, children are terrified. A 2019 Washington Post survey showed that of American children ages thirteen to seventeen, 57 percent feel afraid about climate change, 52 percent feel angry, and 42 percent feel guilty. A 2012 academic study of children ages ten to twelve from three schools in Denver found that 82 percent expressed fear, sadness, and anger when discussing their feelings about the environment, and a majority of the children shared apocalyptic views about the future of the planet. It is telling that for 70 percent of the children, television, news, and movies were central to forming their terrified views. Ten-year-old Miguel says about the future:

There wont be as many countries anymore because of global warming, because I hear on like the Discovery Channel and science channels like in three years the world might flood from the heat getting too much.

These findings, if valid nationwide, suggest that more than ten million American children are terrified of climate change.

As a result of this fear, around the world children are skipping school to protest against global warming. Why attend classes when the world will end soon? Recently, a Danish first-grader asked her teacher earnestly: What will we do when the world ends? Where will we go? The rooftops? Parents can find a glut of online instructions and guides with titles like Parenting in a World Hurtling Toward Catastrophe and On Having Kids at the End of the World. And so, representing her generations genuinely held terror, a young girl holds up a sign that says Ill die of climate change.

I HAVE BEEN part of the global discussion on climate change policy for two decades, since writing The Skeptical Environmentalist. Throughout all this time, I have argued that climate change is a real problem. Contrary to what you hear, the basic climate findings have remained remarkably