If we are to dispense with fossil fuels the hysterical consensus had better be right
It’s one thing to criticise the frenetic rollout of solar and wind power on economic and technological grounds: it is shockingly expensive, and the push will ultimately fail given our huge and growing energy demands (think AI’s soaring demand for electricity). It’s another to point out that Australia’s contribution to global emissions is negligible: whatever we do, however great the self-inflicted damage, our efforts won’t make a scrap of difference to global emission trends, let alone the climate itself.
Unfortunately, for too many voters these rational arguments are easily dismissed. The media and political class have been so effective in convincing a large proportion of the public that a bleak future awaits their children and grandchildren unless fossil fuels are curtailed, that “doing something”, whatever the cost, has become a moral imperative – practically a religious edict.
History provides ample evidence of humans behaving in highly destructive and irrational ways when stirred by religious conviction, and anthropogenic climate change plays much the same role as the state-backed religions of earlier eras. For this large group, only arguments that undermine the supposed scientific consensus will be effective in tempering support for radical decarbonisation.
If “belief” in climate change has become a kind of religion, the only antidote is exposing the shaky foundations of its theology.
On that count the Trump administration has performed a great public service, in July issuing an accessible 131-page report by serious scientists that highlights the gross exaggerations and false certainty surrounding the populist climate change narrative. As expected, the media has tried to discredit it but the work draws only on peer-reviewed research, much of it referenced by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change itself.
It turns out that the apocalyptic predictions beloved of the doomsayers are based on forecast increases in carbon dioxide emissions that haven’t been occurring and show little likelihood of doing so. The best climate models have repeatedly shown substantially more warming than have actual observations since 1979.
Indeed, the US exhibited more and more extreme heatwaves in the 1920s and 1930s, underscoring the difficulty of ascribing recent increases in temperature to more recent human activity and the folly of attributing random weather events to long-term climatic trends.
The warming that has occurred may even have been beneficial: between a quarter and half of the Earth experienced a beneficial “greening” between 1982 and 2011 owing to the increased carbon dioxide in the air, a reminder that plants and animals evolved under much higher levels of C02 than at present. Indeed, coral coverage in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef has surged over the past two decades, rather than declined, as many people mistakenly believe.
Finally, the report points out that the tired assertion that hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and droughts have become more frequent and severe simply isn’t supported by the historical data.
“Climate change is real, and it deserved attention. But it is not the greatest threat facing humanity; that distinction belongs to global energy poverty,” US Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who, unlike Chris Bowen, holds degrees in engineering from MIT, writes in the foreword.
Even before the report emerged, the notion of “consensus” on climate change was highly misleading.
Consider the endlessly repeated claim that “97 per cent of scientists agree on catastrophic climate change”. The actual studies behind the figure show only that most climate scientists believe humans have contributed in some way to recent warming – hardly a radical position.
One source of this dubious figure was a 2009 survey of more than 10,000 “Earth scientists”. Buried in the fine print, the vaunted 97 per cent came not from the whole sample but from just 75 self-proclaimed climate specialists, of whom 73 said human activity was a factor in warming. Another paper from 2013 reached a similar number by counting abstracts that suggested any human role in warming – no matter how trivial – and disregarding the majority of papers that expressed no opinion either way.
Genuine consensus in science doesn’t need to be advertised with a percentage plucked from dubious surveys; it stands on the strength of evidence. But the “97 per cent” mantra has proved invaluable for activists and governments eager to cloak costly policies in an aura of inevitability. If the case for radical decarbonisation were truly so overwhelming, it wouldn’t need to rest on marketing gimmicks.
The Covid pandemic offered useful parallels. There, too, the media created the impression most “experts” backed extreme measures when in reality very few supported them – and, not surprisingly, far fewer today!
In any case, science isn’t a democracy; those who criticise the manufactured consensus, often at great personal cost, should be paid far more attention than others who jump on the bandwagon to secure career gains or public acclaim.
The genius of the climate change fear campaign, however, is that, unlike Covid, its forecasts are not easily shown to be wrong. Predictions of disaster decades into the future are conveniently immune to real-time falsification. By the time the public realise they were exaggerated, the economic damage will have been done.
If we are to dispense with fossil fuels – which have underpinned an unprecedented efflorescence in human living standards over the past two centuries – the hysterical consensus had better be right.
The likelihood is that, as with so many religious manias of the past, it won’t be, and the sacrifice will be very real, while the promised deliverance never arrives.
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As a former economics editor of this masthead, and now as chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs, I have generally avoided commenting on the science of climate change. But it’s increasingly incumbent on ordinary citizens to cast a critical eye over the so-called “consensus” that humans are mainly responsible for catastrophic climate change, because this belief is underpinning massive economic destruction.