United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres inaugurated the UN Climate Ambition Summit in New York City, asserting that “humanity has opened the gates of hell.”
After experiencing the warmest summer ever recorded, marked by a series of severe weather incidents with increasing global temperatures, Guterres outlined some of its consequences.
“Horrendous heat is having horrendous effects,” he commented. “Distraught farmers watching crops carried away by floods. Sweltering temperatures spawning disease.”
Activists in Europe are blocking roads, splashing paint or tomato soup on famous works of art, and gluing themselves to tarmacs. In America, activists recently blocked the only access road to the Burning Man festival in Nevada.
Surely, climate change is urgent.
But Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus and a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, asserts it is not as crucial as it truly is.
“As surely as temperatures rise during the summer, climate alarmism serves up more stories of life-threatening heat domes, apocalyptic fires and biblical floods, all blamed squarely on global warming,” he wrote recently. “Yet, the data to prove this link is often cherry-picked, and the proposed policy responses could be more effective.”
Lomborg goes on to explain that “Even if all the world’s ambitious carbon-cutting promises were magically enacted, these policies would only slow future warming. Stronger heat waves would still kill more people, just slightly fewer than they would have. A sensible response would focus first on resilience, meaning more air conditioning and cooler cities through greenery and water features.”
Liz Peek, a former partner of major bracket Wall Street firm Wertheim & Company and writing for The Hill, noted “the climate-obsessed European Union (EU) and United Kingdom (UK), where a decades-long war against fossil fuels caused a radical shift to unstable power sources and enabled Russian President Vladimir Putin’s energy chokehold…”
In fact, she wrote, “The same lawmakers who have supported the irresponsible vetoing of natural gas pipelines and reckless reliance on renewable energy are suddenly worried that their policies may harm voters.”
Last year, the Pew Research Center published a poll showing that 47% of U.S. adults say the Biden administration’s climate policies “are taking the country in the wrong direction.”
But Guterres sees the issue differently, making climate change his main focus and emphasizing the need for bolder steps to curb greenhouse gas emissions responsible for climate change and enhanced financial aid for the hardest-hit nations.
According to the U.N. website, “While the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has said that 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming over preindustrial temperatures will cause catastrophic global consequences, national pledges to reduce emissions have so far fallen short of what is needed to stay below that threshold — leaving what experts call an ‘emissions gap.’ The world already has warmed 1.1℃, and current policies put the world on pace for an estimated 2.7℃ (4℉) of warming by the end of this century.”
“Climate action is dwarfed by the scale of the challenge,” said Guterres, who is trying to build momentum for bigger, bolder national pledges of climate action at the next U.N. Climate Change Conference, known as COP28, which is set to begin in Dubai on Nov. 30.
But activists on the Right are trying to downplay the urgency of global warming and the need to mitigate it.
Patrick T. Brown, a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University and doctor of earth and climate sciences, recently published an article in which he said editors at Nature and Science – two of the most prestigious scientific journals – select “climate papers that support certain preapproved narratives.”
He claimed the world’s leading academic journals reject papers which don’t “support certain narratives” about the issue and instead favor “distorted” research which hypes up dangers rather than solutions.
During the first Republican debate in August, GOP candidates argued over climate change, with Vivek Ramaswamy saying, “I’m the only candidate on stage who isn’t bought and paid for, so I can say this — the climate change agenda is a hoax. And so the reality is more people are dying of bad climate change policies than they are of actual climate change.”
But the Biden administration has set far-reaching policies aimed at combatting the effects of climate change.
“We’ve conserved more land, we’ve rejoined the Paris Climate Accords, we’ve passed the $368 billion climate control facility. We’re moving. It is the existential threat to humanity,” U.S President Joe Biden said in an interview with The Weather Channel in August.
After Democrat-led New York City announced it may ban coal-fired pizza ovens, the backlash was quick and furious.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee tweeted that “in the name of their climate agenda, the Left wants to destroy small businesses.” Dave Portnoy, founder of Barstool Sports, in a video accused a “pink-haired crazy liberal” of waking up from a nap and deciding to “get rid of coal-oven pizzerias in New York City.” Elon Musk also chimed in, saying on Twitter that the rule is “total bs,” adding that “it won’t make a difference to climate change.”
Hayden Ludwig, a senior investigative researcher at the Capital Research Center in Washington, DC., wrote about this issue two years ago.
“Owning the battlefield in this war starts with controlling the language. We’ve seen this play out in the debate over abortion access… Now it’s spreading to the debate over climate change, with environmental activists claiming there’s nothing ‘partisan’ about their one-sided campaign to fundamentally transform America.”
Ludwig warned that “Radicals, socialists, and authoritarians know that global warming offers them the best chance to weaponize Big Government and dictate where Americans live and work, what they drive, eat, and buy, and even what beliefs they’re allowed to hold—all through fear.”
He said that all the climate groups “want skeptical Republicans to compromise with uncompromising leftists on their global warming policies.”
Lomborg agreed, writing, “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.
Lomborg suggested 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.”
But he is mistaken.
Conservatives need to start taking climate change seriously and stop claiming that the Left is engaging in misleading, alarmist narratives. Climate change is the most urgent problem today and it is imperative to continue to find ways to reduce greenhouse emissions and achieve tangible results.