Why Apocalyptic Claims About Climate Change Are NOT Wrong
I came across this on the frontpage of Hackers News which is arguing that apocalyptic claims related to climate change are overblown and simply not true.
About the author
I don't usually like to point towards credentials and prefer evaluating arguments on their own merit, but I'll make an exception in this case:
Shellenberger was raised in Greeley, Colorado and attended college at Earlham College, a Quaker school in Richmond, Indiana. He went on to receive a master's degree in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Shellenberger has two children and resides in the San Francisco Bay area.
Main points
Forbes points to this article amongst others, stating that the media coverage linking these fires to climate change is "improperly presented". But then it goes onto say
Both Nepstad and Coutinho say the real threat is from accidental forest fires in drought years, which climate change could worsen. “The most serious threat to the Amazon forest is the severe events that make the forests vulnerable to fire. That’s where we can get a downward spiral between fire and drought and more fire.”
Despite climate change, deforestation, and widespread and misleading coverage of the situation, Nepstad hasn’t given up hope.
In essence, Forbes does admit that climate change at least plays a role in these forest fires. The author goes onto say that
There is good evidence that the catastrophist framing of climate change is self-defeating because it alienates and polarizes many people.
It points towards this paper as "evidence" that catastrophist framing of the climate change issue is self-defeating. The linked paper however does not seem to imply anything like this. On the contrary, the paper says that people largely follow the opinions of the influential elites.
When attitudes harden and diverge, it is often driven by the behavior of political elites, who shape the frames and mental models that people use to interpret events. Scholars have long observed that people resort instinctively to heuristics to ease the burden of making decisions, especially on issues like climate, where there is an obvious disconnect between scientific understanding and mass competence.
With that in mind, it naturally follows why climate change is such a polarizing, partisan issue. The leaders of the Republican Party largely deny climate change. The republican President of the United States believes that climate change is a hoax. Republicans aren't interested in a middle ground. Most of the party and its executive lead doesn't believe in climate change at all.
The article does not give any evidence to support its claim that catastrophist framing of climate change alienates and polarizes people. Instead the paper Forbes links to reinforces that opinions around climate change are highly partisan and that people tend to ascribe to the beliefs of their influential party leaders.
And exaggerating climate change risks distracting us from other important issues including ones we might have more near-term control over.
The article makes no mention of the other issues it is talking about, and secondly doesn't demonstrate how taking climate change very seriously is distracting or detrimental in anyway.
First, no credible scientific body has ever said climate change threatens the collapse of civilization much less the extinction of the human species.
That's a very very specific thing to ask for. I think that the collapse of civilzation and extinction of humans is obviously the worst possible outcome. It is incredibly suspicious of Forbes to use that as the criteria to measure the impact of climate change against. Even if say we were to lose a quarter of the population due to climate change, it would be considered devastating. It goes without saying that a number of catastrophic scenarios could take place as a result of climate that would be devastating but not result in the total and complete annihilation of the human race.
The National Climate Assessment paints a very grim picture indeed.
- Tens of thousands of additional deaths a year, just in the U.S, due to weather extremes, changes in migratory patterns of disease carrying vectors like ticks or mosquitoes, and exacerbation of diseases like asthma and hay fever.
- Temperature extremes, more frequent droughts and increased CO2 emissions will make it harder to produce wheat, corn, soybean, rice and other crops at the rates needed for a rising population.
- An estimated 10% loss of the GDP by 2100. In comparison, the Great Recession resulted in a loss of merely 4.3% GDP loss.
- Loss of up to 2 billion labor hours by 2090 due to temperature extremes.
- Crumbling infrastructure, not designed to withstand the higher intensity and more frequent hurricanes, wild fires and storms.
Conditions were so volatile in southern California, the National Weather Service was forced to create an entirely new category of the “red flag warning” used in high fire-risky weather – the “extreme red flag warning”.
- Higher temperatures are linked to more murders.
Forbes says
But in saying so, the XR spokesperson had grossly misrepresented the science. “There is robust evidence of disasters displacing people worldwide,” notes IPCC, “but limited evidence that climate change or sea-level rise is the direct cause”
What about “mass migration”? “The majority of resultant population movements tend to occur within the borders of affected countries," says IPCC.
Suspiciously, the source Forbes points to for these quotes does not have these quotes. The provided source does not claim, even in paraphrase, that displacement of people due to sea-level rise is not going to be a problem if emissions and heating trends were to continue up to the 3C projected heating.
Whereas World Bank: Turn down the heat : why a 4°C warmer world must be avoided says
A significant fraction of the world population is settled along coastlines, often in large cities with extensive infrastructure, making sea-level rise potentially one of the most severe long-term impacts of climate change, depending upon the rate and ultimate magnitude of the rise.
And The Guardian reports
Cities from Shanghai to Alexandria, and Rio to Osaka are among the worst affected. Miami would be inundated - as would the entire bottom third of the US state of Florida.
Forbes makes a number of extremely naive points that makes me question the validity of the entire organization. I am astonished that this level of reporting made it to the masses and fear for the negative impact it may have had on people.
In 1931, 3.7 million people died from natural disasters. In 2018, just 11,000 did. And that decline occurred over a period when the global population quadrupled.
Forbes compares 1931 to 2018 and writes off nearly a century of technological development and breakthroughs to merely "economic development".
What about sea level rise? IPCC estimates sea level could rise two feet (0.6 meters) by 2100.
This is misleading. The source Forbes points to states:
the rise by 2100 is 0.52 to 0.98 m
The available evidence indicates that sustained global warming greater than a certain threshold above pre-industrial would lead to the near-complete loss of the Greenland ice sheet over a millennium or more, causing a global mean sea level rise of about 7 m
Forbes also entirely forgets to mention this part of the same report:
It is very likely that there will be a significant increase in the occurrence of future sea level extremes in some regions by 2100, with a likely increase in the early 21st century. This increase will primarily be the result of an increase in mean sea level (high confi- dence), with the frequency of a particular sea level extreme increasing by an order of magnitude or more in some regions by the end of the 21st century.
Does that sound apocalyptic or even “unmanageable”?
It is absolutely mind boggling how such naive, fallacious rhetoric is allowed to be published by Forbes. Maybe the author hasn't read about the Domino Effect. Small changes in the environment can add up to dramatic changes. When we say global warming or heating, we are only talking about a few degrees celsius change in the global temperatures from pre-industrialization time. This small change in the global temperatures is enough to dramatically affect the climate. After all, it's hard to even notice this change locally. Imagine turning your AC down or up a few degrees, the change isn't very noticeable. But this small change is enough to cause Vietnam to be completely submerged by 2050.
Consider that one-third of the Netherlands is below sea level, and some areas are seven meters below sea level. You might object that Netherlands is rich while Bangladesh is poor. But the Netherlands adapted to living below sea level 400 years ago. Technology has improved a bit since then.
The author merely shrugged off a 1 meter rise in global sea-levels. It took the Netherlands literally over a thousand years to engineer solutions against flooding. Despite over a thousand years of efforts, the flooding killed over 2500 in 1953 and threatened over 200,000 people in 1993/1995. The author makes it sound as if this problem in Netherlands was fully solved 400 years ago, which couldn't be further from the truth.
Expecting what took Netherlands over a thousand years to develop in their flood control systems to take place in less than a 100 years over an inconceivably larger scale is simply foolish.
The article then goes on to say that:
Climate change may threaten one million species globally and half of all mammals, reptiles, and amphibians in diverse places like the Albertine Rift in central Africa, home to the endangered mountain gorilla.
As tragic as animal extinctions are, they do not threaten human civilization. If we want to save endangered species, we need to do so because we care about wildlife for spiritual, ethical, or aesthetic reasons, not survival ones.
In contrast, the Chicago Sun Times reports:
Of the 18 measured ways nature helps humans, the report said 14 are declining, with food and energy production noticeable exceptions. The report found downward trends in nature’s ability to provide clean air and water, good soil and other essentials.
Small changes in ecosystems can result in massive cascading changes downstream. Consider the Africanized Honey Bee, which began as an experiment in 1956. African lowland bees were cross-bred with European bees. The resulting bees were more aggressive, stronger and faster than their parents. 26 swarms were accidentally released from quarantine. Since then, the specie has traveled and spread throughout South America/North America. It is overwhelmingly invasive.
Studies have consistently shown that Africanized drones are more numerous, stronger and faster than their European cousins and are therefore able to out-compete them during these mating flights. The results of mating between Africanized drones and European queens is almost always Africanized offspring
They can chase a person a quarter of a mile (400 m); they have killed some 1,000 humans, with victims receiving ten times more stings than from European honey bees. They have also killed horses and other animals.
And this is why killing off one million species globally may change our environment in a catastrophic way that we may not even be able to imagine at the moment. This why one of the reasons scientists and real environmental conservationists try so hard to preserve the environment. It's not merely for spiritual reasons, it's also for self preservation. Every specie has a niche to fulfill. Eradicating species results in changes that may be threatening to us.
Finally the article brings up a ludicrous point:
Part of what bothers me about the apocalyptic rhetoric by climate activists is that it is often accompanied by demands that poor nations be denied the cheap sources of energy they need to develop. I have found that many scientists share my concerns.
He says many scientists share his concern, but only mentions one. The author does not provide a source for this quote, and I can't find one on the internet.
It doesn’t sound like it makes sense. Coal is terrible for carbon. But it’s by burning a lot of coal that they make themselves wealthier, and by making themselves wealthier they have fewer children, and you don’t have as many people burning carbon, you might be better off in 2070.
Hacker News user jmull refutes this rather nicely:
Ah, the modern approach to climate change denial: OK, climate change is real and caused by people [ya think?], but it's more of a problem of koalas and gorillas and not a big problem for people. And what we really need to do is burn more coal. Complete BS.
E.g. the rationale of burning coal is that if India burns more coal they'll become wealthier faster and that will push the birthrate down, which will result in fewer people using less energy. That obviously makes no sense since wealthier nations have much higher per-capita carbon emissions which far more than offsets lower population growth. E.g. the US has ~8x the per-capita carbon emissions of India. (Now a constant change in the rate of population growth will overcome that difference in enough time -- but there's no reason to expect the difference to be constant. In fact, no exponential phenomenon holds a constant rate of growth for long since it must soon outstrip the environment that allows it.)
All in all this is a pretty weak article. It undermines everything that true environmentalists have been trying to do in order to preserve our environment and prevent catastrophic climate change that will surely affect millions of people. The fact that it may not be completely apocalyptic is not a reason against the sense of urgency that we should all have in reducing CO2 emissions and preventing catastrophic climate change.