Thinking Critically about Climate Change
By Joseph Kellard
On a snowy day in the late 1970s, I walked home from middle school with my friend who relayed some alarming news: A new ice age was coming.1
Scientists had concluded that our polluting automobiles, smokestacks, and industrial activity were damaging the planet.2 Somehow we were frosting Mother Earth, threatening her and the lives of her inhabitants. Who was I, a teenage student, to doubt these experts?
Strangely, about ten years later, predictions of catastrophic “global cooling” had melted away. A new consensus prevailed: Our planet was heating up. Carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels were causing a greenhouse effect in the atmosphere. Consequently, “global warming” would turn arable lands into dust bowls, melt polar ice caps causing island nations and coastal cities to submerge into the sea, and wreak other havoc on the environment and on human life.3
Respected media outlets were echoing these catastrophic predictions, so they must have been accurate, right? Although I knew nothing about climate science, I sensed that something was amiss. How could predictions from prestigious scientists, governmental bodies, and journalists swing from claims of Siberian cold to Saharan heat in such a short period of time? The seeds of my skepticism were sown.
During the 1990s, claims of runaway warming grew more pervasive and dire. I finally started to take a closer look at the facts. Rather than take for granted what the mainstream media, environmentalist organizations, and politicians were prognosticating, I wondered if there were scientists or journalists who shared my suspicions.
When I read books such as Facts Not Fear by Michael Sanera and Jane Shaw, I found that my initial skepticism was warranted. In his 1993 book Eco-Scam, science writer Ronald Bailey wrote that with “the current apocalyptic hysteria” over global warming, “some prominent global coolers have adroitly converted themselves fifteen years later into ardent global warmers.”4
Bailey continued: “Global coolers predicted colder temperatures would bring droughts to India, the Sahara Desert, and the American Midwest. Fifteen years later global warmers would claim the same regions would suffer droughts as temperatures rose.”5
I started to match the disparate claims of climate catastrophes with environmentalists’ other related doomsday scenarios, including overpopulation, dramatic resource depletion, and mass starvation. By then, many of their claims had already failed to come true, or the exact opposite had transpired.
For example, Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford biologist and notorious doomsayer, predicted in 1970 that four billion people worldwide (including sixty-five million Americans) would die of famines throughout the 1980s.6 Nothing remotely like this prediction happened. Yet these and similar doomsday scenarios predominated despite the “Green Revolution” in which agricultural scientist Norman Borlaug essentially manipulated nature to dramatically increase worldwide food production, ultimately saving an estimated one billion people from starving to death.
My self-education on these issues sparked recall of my miseducation at school. For instance, my sixth-grade math teacher (a math teacher) told our class in 1977 that humans would deplete Earth’s oil and gas entirely by the year 2000—a claim that Bailey points out was popularized by the 1972 book The Energy Crisis, in which the authors projected oil and gas reserves would dry up in twenty and thirty years, respectively.7
Fast-forward to the 2010s. Instead of acknowledging that their failed predictions kept piling up, environmentalist doomsayers reframed “global warming” as “climate change,” an ambiguous, elastic term allowing them to cast virtually any changes of climate (or weather) as problematic.8
Alex Epstein’s 2014 book The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels—which contends that cheap, plentiful oil, gas, and coal have enormously improved our planet for human flourishing—frames these failed predictions in ethical terms. Epstein chronicles how some of the most prestigious “experts”—such as NASA scientist Dr. James Hansen and physicist John Holder, President Barack Obama’s science adviser—who propagandized wildly exaggerated climate catastrophes, still traffic shamelessly in such fearmongering under the newer guise of “climate change.” Epstein writes:
Today’s leading thinkers and leading ideas about fossil fuels have a decades-long track record—and given that they are calling for the abolition of our most popular form of energy, it would be irresponsible not to look at how reality has compared to their predictions. Of course, predictions on a societal or global level can never be exact, but they need to be somewhere near the truth.9
The time is long overdue to start treating these prognosticators of climate catastrophes as we would faulty financial advisers.10 If a hedge fund not only consistently failed to secure its confidently predicted returns on investments, but also lost every penny put down, a wise investor would surely move his money elsewhere.
As a new generation of doomsayers emerges, led by the (understandably) panicked teenager Greta Thunberg and her many recycled end-of-civilization estimations, I recognize how important it was for my own development and understanding that I followed my own judgment and sought out books that objectively analyzed the evidence.11 I hope you, too, will consider investigating this complex subject for yourself. I urge you to reconsider the doomsday claims of the climate catastrophists, dig for more facts from various sources, and go by your own judgment. Your life and flourishing depend on it.