A rundown.
A rundown
T he Green Left has an array of tricks to scare people into accepting authoritarian forms of climate regulation. Here are the most overused:
The ‘Existential Threat’ Lie
One of the Green Left’s biggest lies is a President Biden favorite. He explained, for example, in a July 2022 speech, that global warming and increased carbon dioxide emissions are “literally an existential threat to our nation and to the world.” He insisted that climate change “is literally, not figuratively, a clear and present danger” and that “the health of our citizens and our communities is literally at stake,” adding that climate change presents a “code red for humanity.”
The truth is the opposite. NASA’s global-temperature data go back to 1880. The global average temperature since then has risen 1.34 degrees Celsius. Over the past century and a half, global warming and increased CO₂ emissions have saved and will likely continue to save millions of lives. Studies from around the world show that colder temperatures cause far more deaths than warmer temperatures do. How many more? Over 17 times more, 22 scientists from around the world found in a study published in May 2015 by the British medical journal the Lancet. The study used “the largest dataset ever collected to assess temperature–health associations,” which included more than 74 million deaths between 1985 and 2012 in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Another study, published in July 2021, also in the Lancet, reported nine times more cold-related than heat-related deaths.
Increased CO₂ emissions, similarly, are beneficial rather than harmful. As some of the world’s greatest physicists, including Princeton’s William Happer and MIT’s Richard Lindzen, wrote in February 2017, the CO₂ that each of us exhales with every breath “is not a pollutant.” In a March 2023 statement, Nobel Prize–winning physicist John Clauser put it more emphatically: “Increasing CO₂ concentrations will benefit the world.” Happer and Lindzen spelled this out in July 2023 comments submitted to the EPA:
CO₂ is the basis for nearly all life on earth. . . . Without CO₂, there would be no photosynthesis, no food and no human or other life. . . . A major social benefit of increasing CO₂ in the atmosphere is the indisputable science that it increases the amount of food that plants produce through what is known as CO₂ ‘fertilization.’ More CO₂ means more food. . . . The effects know no boundaries.
The ‘Economy at Risk’ Lie
This is another Green Left favorite that Biden preached in his July 2022 speech and that has no scientific basis.
Steven Koonin, the undersecretary for science in the Department of Energy during the Obama administration, has pointed out that Biden’s very own Council of Economic Advisers reported in March 2023 that the warming of the planet and increased CO₂ emissions will have at most a minimal effect on long-term economic growth. In Clauser’s words: “The popular narrative about climate change reflects a dangerous corruption of science that threatens the world’s economy and the well-being of billions of people. Misguided climate science has metastasized into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience.”
Koonin’s book, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters, indeed shows that the temperature and CO₂-level projections in the U.N. models on which the Green Left relies are speculative and unreliable — they cannot even accurately reproduce the 20th century’s temperature changes.
The ‘More Powerful and Destructive’ Natural Disasters Lie
Research shows that global warming and increased CO₂ emissions do not cause more or deadlier natural disasters.
World population has quadrupled since 1920. And yet, as both global temperatures and CO₂ emissions have increased, data compiled by Oxford University’s Hannah Ritchie, Pablo Rosado, and Max Roser, for EM-DAT (the International Disaster Database), show that average annual deaths from natural disasters have decreased by more than 90 percent.
A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report, updated in April 2024, also refutes the “more powerful and destructive” hurricanes claim. There is essentially no observable long-term trend in the frequency of hurricanes. The rate of landfalling hurricanes in the U.S. has even decreased since the late 1800s:
We conclude that the historical Atlantic hurricane data at this stage do not provide compelling evidence for a substantial greenhouse warming-induced century-scale increase in: frequency of tropical storms, hurricanes, or major hurricanes, or in the proportion of hurricanes that become major hurricanes.
The scientific data similarly give the lie to the Chicken Little claims about fires. Environmental statistician Bjørn Lomborg has cited the key fact: The percentage of land burned per year since the early 1900s has been declining. And in 2022, NASA data showed that “the world hit a new record-low of 2.2% burned area.”
The data also contradict the claim that climate change causes more and worse droughts. Happer’s and Lindzen’s July 2023 comments to the EPA attest that “another enormous social benefit of increasing CO₂ in the atmosphere is that drought-stricken areas will have more food,” as increasing CO₂ emissions reduce droughts.
The ‘Rising Sea Levels’ Lie
In his 2006 climate-doomsday movie An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore proclaimed that global warming could cause a 20-foot rise in seal levels “in the near future.”
Sea levels have been rising — but at a rate of only a single inch every seven to 17 years. “When averaged over all of the world’s oceans, absolute sea level has risen at an average rate of 0.06 inches per year from 1880 to 2013,” an EPA report updated in November 2023 found, with a slightly increased rate since 1993 of “0.12 to 0.14 inches per year.”
Those with dictatorial inclinations often rely on lies and fearmongering to exercise power. We must not let Biden and the Green Left use lies to impose their authoritarian climate regulation.
John Fund is National Review’s national-affairs reporter. David M. Simon is a lawyer in Chicago and a senior fellow at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity.