No existential climate change impacts – reports are flawed, humans adapt, no natural disasters, food production increasing

In early 2019, newly elected twenty-nine-year-old congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sat down for an interview with a correspondent for The Atlantic. AOC, as she is known, made the case for a Green New Deal, one that would address poverty and social inequality in addition to climate change. AOC pushed back against critics who claimed it would be too expensive. “The world is going to end in twelve years if we don’t address climate change,” she said, “and your biggest issue is how are we gonna pay for it?” 21

The next day, a reporter for the news website Axios called several climate scientists to get their reactions to AOC’s claim that the world was going to end in twelve years. “All the time-limited frames are bullshit,” said Gavin Schmidt, a NASA climate scientist. “Nothing special happens when the ‘carbon budget’ runs out or we pass whatever temperature target you care about, instead the costs of emissions steadily rise.”22

Andrea Dutton, a paleoclimate researcher at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, said, “For some reason the media latched onto the twelve years (2030), presumably because they thought that it helped to get across the message of how quickly we are approaching this and hence how urgently we need action. Unfortunately, this has led to a complete mischaracterization of what the report said.” 23

What the IPCC had actually written in its 2018 report and press release was that in order to have a good chance of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius from preindustrial times, carbon emissions needed to decline 45 percent by 2030. The IPCC did not say the world would end, nor that civilization would collapse, if temperatures rose above 1.5 degrees Celsius. 24

Scientists had a similarly negative reaction to the extreme claims made by Extinction Rebellion. Stanford University atmospheric scientist Ken Caldeira, one of the first scientists to raise the alarm about ocean acidification, stressed that “while many species are threatened with extinction, climate change does not threaten human extinction.”25 MIT climate scientist Kerry Emanuel told me, “I don’t have much patience for the apocalypse criers. I don’t think it’s helpful to describe it as an apocalypse.”26

An AOC spokesperson told Axios, “We can quibble about the phraseology, whether it’s existential or cataclysmic.” But, he added, “We’re seeing lots of [climate change–related] problems that are already impacting lives.”27

But if that’s the case, the impact is dwarfed by the 92 percent decline in the decadal death toll from natural disasters since its peak in the 1920s. In that decade, 5.4 million people died from natural disasters. In the 2010s, just 0.4 million did.28 Moreover, that decline occurred during a period when the global population nearly quadrupled.

In fact, both rich and poor societies have become far less vulnerable to extreme weather events in recent decades. In 2019, the journal Global Environmental Change published a major study that found death rates and economic damage dropped by 80 to 90 percent during the last four decades, from the 1980s to the present. 29

While global sea levels rose 7.5 inches (0.19 meters) between 1901 and 2010,30 the IPCC estimates sea levels will rise as much as 2.2 feet (0.66 meters) by 2100 in its medium scenario, and by 2.7 feet (0.83 meters) in its high-end scenario. Even if these predictions prove to be significant underestimates, the slow pace of sea level rise will likely allow societies ample time for adaptation.

We have good examples of successful adaptation to sea level rise. The Netherlands, for instance, became a wealthy nation despite having onethird of its landmass below sea level, including areas a full seven meters below sea level, as a result of the gradual sinking of its landscapes. 31

And today, our capability for modifying environments is far greater than ever before. Dutch experts today are already working with the government of Bangladesh to prepare for rising sea levels. 32

What about fires? Dr. Jon Keeley, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist in California who has researched the topic for forty years, told me, “We’ve looked at the history of climate and fire throughout the whole state, and through much of the state, particularly the western half of the state, we don’t see any relationship between past climates and the amount of area burned in any given year.”33

In 2017, Keeley and a team of scientists modeled thirty-seven different regions across the United States and found that “humans may not only influence fire regimes but their presence can actually override, or swamp out, the effects of climate.” Keeley’s team found that the only statistically significant factors for the frequency and severity of fires on an annual basis were population and proximity to development. 34

As for the Amazon, The New York Times reported, correctly, that “[the 2019] fires were not caused by climate change.”35

In early 2020, scientists challenged the notion that rising carbon dioxide levels in the ocean were making coral reef fish species oblivious to predators. The seven scientists who published their study in the journal Nature had, three years earlier, raised questions about the marine biologist who had made such claims in the journal Science in 2016. After an investigation, James Cook University in Australia concluded that the biologist had fabricated her data. 36

When it comes to food production, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) concludes that crop yields will increase significantly, under a wide range of climate change scenarios. 37 Humans today produce enough food for ten billion people, a 25 percent surplus, and experts believe we will produce even more despite climate change. 38

Food production, the FAO finds, will depend more on access to tractors, irrigation, and fertilizer than on climate change, just as it did in the last century. The FAO projects that even farmers in the poorest regions today, like sub-Saharan Africa, may see 40 percent crop yield increases from technological improvements alone. 39

In its fourth assessment report, the IPCC projected that by 2100, the global economy would be three to six times larger than it is today, and that the costs of adapting to a high (4 degrees Celsius) temperature rise would reduce gross domestic product (GDP) just 4.5 percent. 40

Does any of that really sound like the end of the world?