Technology, Not Alarmism, Will

Help Tackle Climate Change

June 14, 2019

By Chelsea Follett | @Chellivia

A new policy report from the Breakthrough National Centre for Climate
Restoration warns that “planetary and human systems [are] reaching a ‘point
of no return’ by mid-century, in which the prospect of a largely uninhabitable
Earth leads to the breakdown of nations and the international order.” This
apocalyptic vision of the year 2050 follows a long tradition of
counterproductive doomsaying.

Former Vice President, and Democratic presidential nominee hopeful, Joe

Biden, has recently placed the “point of no return” even sooner, in just 12
years’ time. “[H]ow we act or fail to act in the next 12 years will determine the
very livability of our planet,” he said earlier this week.

Environmental problems are certainly real, but alarmists do a disservice to

the cause of tackling those challenges when they use cataclysmic language to
describe the near future.

As Harvard University’s Steven Pinker noted in his book Enlightenment Now,

psychological research has shown that “people are likelier to accept the fact of
global warming when they are told that the problem is solvable by
innovations in policy and technology than when they are given dire warnings
about how awful it will be”.

But instead of focusing on solutions, like nuclear power, which does not emit
CO2, and other technological breakthroughs that have the potential to reduce
carbon emissions, some well-meaning people resort to apocalyptic rhetoric.
Humanity has reached the “point of no return” many times already, according
to past doomsayers.

In 2006, Al Gore warned that unless drastic measures were taken “within the
next 10 years,” the world would “reach a point of no return.” That would place
“the point of no return” in 2016.

Thirty years ago, in 1989, an unidentified senior U.N. environmental

official told the Associated Press that “entire nations could be wiped off the
face of the Earth by rising sea levels” if drastic action was not taken by the
year 2000. The ocean has not swallowed any nations since his
prognostication.

In 1982, executive director of the U.N. Environment Program Mostafa Tolba

said that lack of action by the year 2000 would bring “an environmental
catastrophe which will witness devastation as complete, as irreversible, as any
nuclear holocaust.” His prediction of an environmental “nuclear holocaust” in
just 18 years failed to materialize.
Back in 1970, Harvard University biologist George Wald claimed that
“civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken
against problems facing mankind.” His prediction would place the end of
civilization sometime between 1985 and 2000.

Also in 1970, North Texas State University philosopher Peter Gunter wrote,
“By the year 2000, 30 years from now, the entire world, with the exception of
Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”

In 1969, Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich said, “If I were a gambler,
I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” It is a
good thing he did not put down money on that proposition, or he would have
had to pay out 31 years later. (In fact, it would have served his bank account
well to stay away from wagers entirely).

The frequency of hyperbolic, failed predictions of catastrophe would be more

amusing if they were not so damaging to the public’s perception of real
environmental challenges, including climate change.

Fortunately, there are also many environmentalists who hold a less

pessimistic and more realistic view. Rockefeller University professor Jesse H.
Ausubel, who was integral to setting up the world’s first climate change
conference in Geneva in 1979, has shown how technological progress allows
nature to rebound. For example, increasing crop yields to produce more food
with less land reduce the environmental impact of agriculture. In fact, if
farmers worldwide reach the productivity level of the average U.S. farmer,
humanity will be able to return a landmass the size of India back to nature.

In addition to technological progress, economic development can also help

protect the environment. As people rise out of extreme poverty, they often
come to care more about environmental stewardship. The incredible decline
in Chinese poverty spurred by economic liberalization, for example, has
coincided with better preservation of forests. China had 511,807 more square
kilometers of forest in 2015 than it did in 1990. Once a country reaches
around $4,500 in GDP per capita, forest area starts to rebound. This is called
the “forest transition” or, more broadly, the “environmental Kuznets curve”.

Many other such reasons for optimism exist. Yet the new report’s “2050
scenario finds a world in social breakdown and outright chaos,” David Spratt,
the research director at the Breakthrough National Centre for Climate
Restoration, told Vice.

Not to be outdone in pessimism, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

has predicted that “the world is going to end in 12 years” without urgent
action, rather than in 31 years’ time.

In the year 353, a bishop called Hilary of Poitiers also predicted that the
world would end in just 12 years, in 365. It is a safe bet that Congresswoman
Ocasio-Cortez's forecast ends up as inaccurate as his was.

Environmental challenges should be taken seriously. And just as with so

many other problems humanity has faced, environmental problems should be
solvable given the right technology and spreading prosperity. The world will
still exist a dozen years from now.

This first appeared in CapX.