Michael Shellenberger: Why I Believe Climate Change Is Not the End of the World. 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.

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

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.

the slow pace of sea level rise will likely allow societies ample time for adaptation.

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.

What about fires? Dr. Jon Keeley, a US Geological Survey scientist in California who has researched the topic for 40 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.”

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

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.

The Congo has a way of putting first-world prophecies of climate apocalypse into perspective. I traveled there in December 2014 to study the impact of widespread wood fuel use on people and wildlife, particularly on the fabled mountain gorillas.

extreme poverty and chaos

In the 1990s and again in the early 2000s, Congo was the epicenter of the Great African War, the deadliest conflict since World War II, which involved nine African countries and resulted in the deaths of three to five million people, mostly because of disease and starvation

Ninety-eight percent of people in eastern Congo rely on wood and charcoal as their primary energy for cooking.

Researchers with the Peace Research Institute Oslo note, “Demographic and environmental variables have a very moderate effect on the risk of civil conflict.” The IPCC agrees. “There is robust evidence of disasters displacing people worldwide, but limited evidence that climate change or sea-level rise is the direct cause.”

Lower levels of GDP are the most important predictor of armed conflict,” write the Oslo researchers, who add, “Our results show that resource scarcity affects the risk of conflict less in low-income states than in wealthier states.”

There are many reasons why the Congo is so dysfunctional. It is massive—it is the second largest African nation in area, behind only Algeria—and difficult to govern as a single country. It was colonized by the Belgians, who fled the country in the early 1960s without establishing strong government institutions, like an independent judiciary and a military.

The Congo is a victim of geography, colonialism, and terrible post-colonial governments. Its economy grew from $7.4 billion in 2001 to $38 billion in 2017, but the annual per capita income of $561 is one of the lowest in the world, leading many to conclude that much of the money that should flow to the people is being stolen.

The name Extinction Rebellion is inherently pointing towards ‘we’re going to be extinct,’” said Barnett. “Roger Hallam, one of the three founders [of Extinction Rebellion], said in August… ‘Slaughter, death and starvation of six billion people this century.’ There’s no science to back that up, is there?”

Lunnon was referring to an article published in the Guardian in May 2019, which quoted Rockström saying, “It’s difficult to see how we could accommodate a billion people or even half of that” at a four-degree temperature rise. I pointed out that there is nothing in any of the IPCC reports that has ever suggested anything like what she is attributing to Anderson and Rockström.

To get to the bottom of the “billions will die” claim, I interviewed Rockström by phone. He said the Guardian reporter had misunderstood him. What he had actually said, he told me, was this: “It’s difficult to see how we could accommodate eight billion people or even half of that,”

But is there IPCC science showing that food production would actually decline? “As far as I know they don’t say anything about the potential population that can be fed at different degrees of warming,” he said.

scientists have done that study, and two of them were Rockström’s colleagues at the Potsdam Institute. It found that food production could increase even at four to five degrees Celsius warming above preindustrial levels. And, again, technical improvements, such as fertilizer, irrigation, and mechanization, mattered more than climate change.

The report also found, intriguingly, that climate change policies were more likely to hurt food production and worsen rural poverty than climate change itself. The “climate policies” the authors refer to are ones that would make energy more expensive and result in more bioenergy use (the burning of biofuels and biomass), which in turn would increase land scarcity and drive up food costs. The IPCC comes to the same conclusion

“I have written a book calling for a carbon tax,” Pielke says. “I have publicly supported President Obama’s proposed EPA carbon regulations, and I have just published another book strongly defending the scientific assessment of the IPCC with respect to disasters and climate change.”

2006

*The group met in Hohenkammer, Germany, outside of Munich. Pielke wasn’t optimistic that the group would achieve consensus because the group included both environmental activists and climate skeptics. “But much to our surprise and delight,” says Pielke, “all 32 people at the workshop—experts from academia, the private sector, and advocacy groups—reached a consensus on 20 statements on disasters and climate change.

The experts agreed in their unanimous Hohenkammer Statement that climate change is real and humans are contributing to it significantly. But they also agreed that more people and property in harm’s way explained the rising cost of natural disasters, not worsening disasters.*

While Florida experienced eighteen major hurricanes between 1900 and 1959, it experienced just eleven from 1960 to 2018.

The IPCC says the same thing. “Long-term trends in economic disaster losses adjusted for wealth and population increases have not been attributed to climate change,” notes a special IPCC report on extreme weather, “but a role for climate change has not been excluded.”

The IPCC “concluded that there’s little evidence of a spike in the frequency or intensity of floods, droughts, hurricanes and tornadoes,” explains Roger Pielke. “There have been more heatwaves and intense precipitation, but these phenomena are not significant drivers of disaster costs.”

IPCC contributor Michael Oppenheimer

we wouldn’t be able to maintain societal function around the world if sea-level rise approaches those close to four feet. Bangladeshis might be leaving the coast and trying to get into India.”

But millions of small farmers, like the ones on Bangladesh’s low-lying coasts, move to cities every year, I pointed out. Doesn’t the word “unmanageable” suggest a permanent societal breakdown?

“When you have people making decisions they are essentially compelled to make,” he said, “that’s what I’m referring to as ‘an unmanageable situation.’ The kind of situation that leads to economic disruption, disruption of livelihoods, disruption of your ability to control your destiny, and people dying. You can argue that they get manageable. You recover from disasters. But the people who died didn’t recover.”

In other words, the problems from sea level rise that Oppenheimer calls “unmanageable” are situations like the ones that already occur, from which societies recover, and to which they adapt.

We drove around the countryside and interviewed people at random. Caleb used his charm to reassure local villagers who were understandably suspicious about a foreigner asking them questions about their lives. Many people we interviewed were upset about baboons and elephants from nearby Virunga National Park, a protected area for wildlife, raiding their crops.

In response, the park hired some of the youths to shoo away baboons.

What about so-called tipping points, like the rapid, accelerating, and simultaneous loss of Greenland or West Antarctic ice sheets, the drying out of and die-back of the Amazon, and a change of the Atlantic Ocean circulation? The high level of uncertainty on each, and a complexity that is greater than the sum of its parts, make many tipping point scenarios unscientific. That’s not to say that a catastrophic tipping point scenario is impossible, only that there is no scientific evidence that one would be more probable or catastrophic than other potentially catastrophic scenarios, including an asteroid impact, super-volcanoes, or an unusually deadly influenza virus.

Can we credit thirty years of climate alarmism for these reductions in emissions? We can’t. Total emissions from energy in Europe’s largest countries, Germany, Britain, and France, peaked in the 1970s, thanks mostly to the switch from coal to natural gas and nuclear energy — technologies that McKibben, Thunberg, AOC, and many climate activists adamantly oppose.

Rebuttal

Article by Michael Shellenberger mixes accurate and inaccurate claims in support of a misleading and overly simplistic argumentation about climate change

Six scientists analysed the article and estimate its overall scientific credibility to be 'low'. more about the credibility rating A majority of reviewers tagged the article as: Cherry-picking, Misleading.

Specifically, Shellenberger claims that “climate change is not making natural disasters worse.” As the reviewers describe below, this claim is inaccurate and contradicts reports from the IPCC as well as numerous scientific studies linking anthropogenic climate change to temperature extremes, drought, precipitation patterns, and wildfires[1-4].

Shellenberger also claims that “Humans are not causing a ‘sixth mass extinction’”. This categorical statement misrepresents the discussion happening in the scientific community. Scientific evidence clearly shows that human activities are driving global species extinctions, and these extinctions are expected to accelerate with continued global warming[5-12]

Scientists who reviewed this article also noted several misleading claims about wildfires, including “fires have declined 25% around the world since 2003,”

Although global burned area declined ~25% from 1998-2015, this is driven in part by non-climatic factors, such as clearing land for agriculture[15,16]

These claims also contradict scientific studies showing that anthropogenic climate change has increased fire risk in the western U.S. and Canada[17-19].

You can also install the Hypothes.is browser extension to read the scientists’ annotations in context.

Fact-checking interference at Facebook

Emily Atkin: Fact-check of viral climate misinformation quietly removed from Facebook.

A fact-check of a viral climate misinformation article was quietly removed from Facebook earlier this month

The article, authored by Michael Shellenbergerer and published on The Daily Wire, uses 12 "facts" to argue that concern about climate change is overblown. Shellenbergerer's piece was reviewed by seven Ph.D. climate scientists as part of a process organized by Science Feedback, one of Facebook's fact-checking partners. The scientists determined that Shellenger's article was "partly false."

As a result, the distribution of the article on Facebook's platform was reduced

But then, without explanation, the fact-check was removed

Internal Facebook documents obtained by Popular Information reveal that, prior to the removal of the fact-check, Science Feedback's fact-check of The Daily Wire article was brought to the attention of top Facebook executives

Facebook and the executive director of Science Feedback deny that Facebook pushed Science Feedback to remove the "partly false" rating. But the incident raises questions about the integrity of Facebook's fact-checking process,

On July 7, Shellenbergerer posted an open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg claiming that he was being "censored" by Facebook. On July 8, an internal task was created in Facebook's system titled "Urgency: High-Priority (Under 24-Hour Resolution) Science Feedback "Partly False" Rating on Climate Story Shared By Ben Shapiro, Daily Wire…"

Facebook staff determined that the fact-check was well-founded.

Facebook's policy team, based in DC and run by Republican operative Joel Kaplan, does not directly weigh in on the issue of intervention but emphasizes that its "stakeholders" view the fact-check as "biased." It raises the question of who Facebook's policy team considers "stakeholders." The team does disclose it was contacted by the office of Congressman Mike Johnson (R-LA), which questioned the validity of the fact-check.

Johnson is chairman of the powerful Republican Study Committee, which is the policy arm of House conservatives. Johnson is also a large recipient of money from the oil and gas industry. The Congressman says he's "not a big proponent of the climate change data" and does not believe human beings are driving climate change.

Science Feedback is standing by its fact-check of The Daily Wire. It is still the featured fact-check on its homepage. And The Daily Wire did not correct the article. Instead, at the very bottom of the article, Facebook briefly summarized Science Feedback's fact-check and provided a link. (The top of the article notes it has been "reviewed by fact-checkers.") But The Daily Wire placed Shellenbergerer's article behind its paywall so readers can only access the link to Science Feedback if they pay for a premium account, which costs at least $3/month.

“On Behalf of Environmentalists, I Apologize for the Climate Scare,” is promotional copy for Shellenbergerer’s new book, “Apocalypse Never.”

The piece makes several claims that Science Feedback fact-checkers rated false, including that humans “are not causing a ‘sixth mass extinction,’” that “climate change is not making natural disasters worse,” and that “wood fuel is far worse for people and wildfires than fossil fuels.”

Facebook says it does not treat climate misinformation the same as coronavirus misinformation because climate change is not an urgent problem. As Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone told the New York Times: Facebook is most concerned with flagging or removing content that poses an immediate threat to human health and safety, including disinformation about the coronavirus or hate speech that incites violence. Climate change content, he said, does not fall within that category.

Facebook’s characterization of climate change as not “immediate” is dangerously misinformed. Climate change is killing people right now, through increases in extreme weather, disease spread, and air pollution, among other things.