The international agreement from last month’s UN climate conference known as COP30 was notable for making no mention of curbing fossil fuels, a result that may have been influenced by a recent memorandum by Bill Gates. His “Three Tough Truths on Climate” was troubling to activists by arguing against the doomsday view of climate change. He also pivoted from his previous statements about emissions reductions to curb global warming, saying that society should instead prioritize measures which improve human lives.
Even coming from someone as influential as Gates, such a shift from the prevailing “climate catastrophe” narrative will be a tall order. For more than two decades following the release of An Inconvenient Truth, climate alarmism has spread wide and far. While the film was a Hollywood hit, its extensive inaccuracies and exaggerations had the unintended effect of catalyzing the polarization of American public opinion on climate change.
The current divide is wide, represented on one side by the Biden Administration’s injecting nearly every executive action with language to address the “climate crisis,” and on the other by President Trump’s September speech at the UN in which he called global warming a “hoax” and renewable energy a “scam.”
How then, can we restore balance and objectivity to discussions about climate change in the U.S.?
First and foremost, the global scientific community must begin to speak truth to the topic. Unfortunately, we are far from that point right now, as evidenced by the recent report by the National Academies on the effects of human-caused greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Instead of providing a holistic evaluation, the authors were decidedly biased in their unilaterally negative assessment of the climate impacts of GHGs.
For example, increasing wildfire frequency in the Western U.S. is cited, but no mention is made of the fact that their overall occurrence across the nation has not increased for over four decades. Similarly, specific economic costs of climate change are identified, but absent from the report are the overwhelming benefits of abundant and affordable energy allowed by fossil fuels in agriculture, artificial intelligence, transportation,
Such an alarmist bias is also evident in leading scientific journals, which have been shown to selectively publish climate science studies with catastrophic narratives. Most of these employ implausibly high emission scenarios, such as RCP8.5, which has been shown to greatly over-project actual CO2 emissions. Therefore, it is disturbing that so many climate science studies continue to use such an unrealistic scenario.
The media needs to demonstrate more discipline as well. Most mainstream sources are solidly entrenched in the climate apocalypse camp, attributing climate change as the cause of every weather disaster. Unheeded are the expert conclusions in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) sixth and most recent assessment report (AR6), which showed that most extreme weather events in the U.S. do not indicate long-term trends and that claims of increased frequency or intensity of wildfires, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and droughts are not supported by historical data. Thus, non-peer reviewed reports by organizations such as World Weather Attribution that attempt to quantify the contribution of climate change to any given extreme weather event are scientifically unsound.
It’s time for the federal government to show leadership in this area. The Trump Administration got off to a great start with the Department of Energy’s (DOE) recent report on the climate impacts of GHG emissions in the U.S. It provided a more complete picture about how climate change is affecting the country than has been presented in the past, along with a rational evaluation of the social cost of carbon concept, which fails to consider the private marginal benefits to consumers and society of CO2 that derives from the availability of fossil fuels.
However, the administration missed an opportunity by not attending COP30. There, U.S. officials could have added a dose of reality about the ineffectiveness of the Paris Agreement, while reinforcing Bill Gates’ call to move the metric for measuring climate progress from global temperature to one that values quality of life.
Perhaps the most powerful message the U.S. could make concerns the need to be real about the immense value of fossil fuels. It’s a point that will likely never be put forward during COP30, but should be.
This article was originally published by RealClearScience and made available via RealClearWire.
