Urgency on climate change is long overdue
It’s not time to panic about climate change. It’s past time.
Usually, panic is the wrong response to almost every situation. It implies irrational overreaction to threats, often producing unproductive or harmful handling of them.
Yet, the existential threat that climate change poses to life on Earth and the very planet itself requires at least an element of panic as a catalyst to a meaningful, sustained response.
Worry hasn’t worked. Concern hasn’t worked. Alarm hasn’t worked.
Globally, June of this year was the hottest June on record, going back almost two centuries when the United States and Britain first began tracking atmospheric temperatures.
On July 3, the hottest daily mean global temperature ever was reached at 62.69 degrees Fahrenheit. The next day set another record. So did the next, and the next. From July 3 through July 29, the Earth experienced 29 consecutive hottest days — in any month, in any year, ever.
History’s greatest physicists and mathematicians, from Isaac Newton to Albert Einstein, loved the certainty of numbers.
It’s impossible to argue with the grim certainty of the ever more frightening climate numbers on our precious planet.
Whether or not panic is warranted, our anxiety is already rising, almost in concert with the inexorable increase in global temperatures.
While “climate anxiety” is not yet an official psychological disorder, therapists report a growing number of patients with what some call eco-anxiety, a term first coined in 2007, especially among young people. A peer-reviewed article published in May 2023 in the journal Nature Mental Health cited a recent study of 10,000 people ages 16-25 in 10 countries: Fifty-nine percent of those polled said they were very worried or extremely worried about climate change — and 84 percent were somewhat worried.
It makes sense that young people feel the most urgency about climate change. They have the longest still to live on a planet enduring more uncontrollable wildfires, more unbearable heat waves, more glacial melting, more warming of both the deepest seas and the blankets of air above them, more hurricanes unleashed by warmer oceans, more deforestation, more destruction of the life-saving trees that combat global warming by removing carbon dioxide from the air and releasing oxygen into the atmosphere.
We owe enormous gratitude to one singular young person who, as much as anyone else, has compelled her elders to fi
general statements to attribute changes in flood events to anthropogenic climate change.” The experts emphasize that neither river nor coastal floods are statistically detectable from the background noise of natural climate variability. Indeed, the U.N. panel finds that such floods won’t be statistically detectable by the end of the century, even under an extreme scenario.
In the United States, flood damage cost 0.5% of gross domestic
product in the early 1900s. Now, it costs only onetenth of that because greater resiliency and development vastly outweigh any residual climate signal.
While climate alarmism reaches new heights of scariness — with the U.N. secretary general’s “global boiling” claims entering ridiculous territory — the reality is more prosaic. Global warming will cause costs equivalent to one or two recessions over the rest of this century. That makes it a real problem, not an end-of-the-world catastrophe that justifies the costliest policies.
The commonsense response would be recognizing that both climate change and carbon-cutting policies incur costs. We should carefully negotiate a middle pathway where we aim for effective approaches that do the most to reduce damages at a reasonable cost.
To do better on climate, we must resist the misleading, alarmist climate narrative. Panic is a terrible adviser.
Bjorn Lomborg is the president of the Copenhagen Consensus and a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He wrote this for Insidesources.com.