YES climate change is real. Yes human activity is a contributing factor. Yes there is a scientific consensus that this is true. NO there is not a scientific consensus that the appropriate action is to delegate new authority to the government to seize control over industry to attempt to fix the problem. As we have seen in almost every other issue, delegating huge new authorities to the government almost always makes the problem was worse.
Ignore the Fear Mongering, Here's What Climate Change Models Actually Say
An Earth scientist’s recent article making the rounds on social media highlights a terrifying conversation he had with “a very senior member” of the IPCC, which is the UN’s body devoted to studying climate science. The upshot of their conversation was that millions of people will die from climate change, a conclusion that leads the author to lament that humans have created a consumption-driven civilization that is “hell bent on destroying itself.”
As with most such alarmist rhetoric, there is little to document these sweeping claims—even if we restrict ourselves to “official” sources of information, including the IPCC reports themselves. The historical record does not justify panic, but instead should lead us to expect continued progress for humanity, so long as the normal operation of voluntary market interactions continues without significant political interference to sabotage it.
The Conversation
Here is the opening hook from James Dyke’s article, in which he grabs the reader with an apocalyptic conversation:
It was the spring of 2011, and I had managed to corner a very senior member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) during a coffee break at a workshop… The IPCC reviews the vast amounts of science being generated around climate change and produces assessment reports every four years. Given the impact the IPPC’s findings can have on policy and industry, great care is made to carefully present and communicate its scientific findings. So I wasn’t expecting much when I straight out asked him how much warming he thought we were going to achieve before we manage to make the required cuts to greenhouse gas emissions. “Oh, I think we’re heading towards 3°C at least,” he said. … “But what about the many millions of people directly threatened,” I went on. “Those living in low-lying nations, the farmers affected by abrupt changes in weather, kids exposed to new diseases?” He gave a sigh, paused for a few seconds, and a sad, resigned smile crept over his face. He then simply said: “They will die.”
Putting aside the creepiness of someone smiling as he predicts millions of deaths—sort of like a James Bond villain—we must inquire: How plausible are these warnings? Does the climate change literature actually support such bold projections?
As it turns out, the answer is “no.” It is certainly true that there are many particular dangers regarding climate change, which could have deleterious consequences on human welfare (broadly defined). But in order to conclude that millions—or even billions, as the author of the article states in his concluding remarks—of deaths hang in the balance, we have to grossly exaggerate all of the various mechanisms and scenarios, and we have to assume that humans do nothing to adapt to the changing circumstances over the course of decades.
In reality, it is much more likely that humans will adapt to whatever changes the climate brings them in the coming decades, and that various measures of human well-being—including not just GDP but also life expectancy and declining mortality rates from various ailments—will continue to improve. The voluntary market economy is an excellent general purpose solution to the challenges facing humanity, including the handling of whatever curve balls climate change might throw.
IPCC’s Summary of Climate Change Damages
Unfortunately, it is difficult to come up with a statistic such as, “How many excess deaths does the IPCC predict from climate change by the year 2100, if governments don’t take further action?” If you consult the AR5, which is the latest IPCC report, and look at chapter 11 (Working Group II) on the impacts of climate change on human health, you will see various trouble areas and figures concerning at-risk populations, but nothing so crisp as to allow us to evaluate the casual claims of millions of deaths.
However, the IPCC chapter does tell us upfront:
The Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) pointed to dramatic improvement in life expectancy in most parts of the world in the 20th century, and this trend has continued through the first decade of the 21st century (Wang et al., 2012). Rapid progress in a few countries (especially China) has dominated global averages, but most countries have benefited from substantial reductions in mortality.
There remain sizable and avoidable inequalities in life expectancy within and between nations in terms of education, income, and ethnicity (Beaglehole and Bonita, 2008) and in some countries, official statistics are so patchy in quality and coverage that it is difficult to draw firm conclusions about health trends (Byass, 2010).
Years lived with disability have tended to increase in most countries (Salomon et al., 2012). If economic development continues as forecast, it is expected that mortality rates will continue to fall in most countries; the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates the global burden of disease (measured in disability-adjusted life years per capita) will decrease by 30% by 2030, compared with 2004 (WHO, 2008a).
The underlying causes of global poor health are expected to change substantially, with much greater prominence of chronic diseases and injury; nevertheless, the major infectious diseases of adults and children will remain important in some regions, particularly sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia (Hughes et al., 2011). [IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, Working Group II, Chapter 11, bold added.]
What about the Catastrophic Scenarios?
Now it’s true, nobody can guarantee that there won’t be a climate change catastrophe. But we must realize that at least several of the featured studies warning of huge negative impacts are based on obviously flawed assumptions.
Oren Cass provides us with some examples. One study looked at the increase in mortality in a cold, northern US city during a particularly brutal summer, and then extrapolated to show a staggering number of excess heat deaths decades down the road, when such “bad summers” were more common. Yet in the projections, the northern cities were no hotter than southern US cities are right now, and yes these southern cities don’t have nearly the same heat death rate as is projected for the northern cities decades down the road.
What is happening here should be obvious after a moment’s reflection: A northern city like Philadelphia is not adapted to hot summer the way Houston or Las Vegas is. But if climate change did indeed make such temperatures the norm—over the course of several decades—then the residents of the northern cities would adapt. They would install more air conditioning, and the people born in the year (say) 2080 would be much better able physically to cope with higher temperatures in 2100 than the people alive today.
This is also the general response I would give the issue of sea level rise. I think that much of the rhetoric here is overblown, but even to the extent that it is true, we don’t need to worry about millions of people literally dying. Even if true, this is a problem that will manifest itself over several generations. If certain coastal regions are truly threatened, then in the worst case humans will stop building (and eventually even repairing) the houses and businesses near the rising seas. Humans can gradually move out of these (sinking) neighborhoods and go further inland, through a process of attrition rather than mass migration in the face of a tidal wave.
Conclusion
The climate change alarmists are given a free pass to throw out the most absurd rhetoric, such as a recent author’s warning that potentially billions of people could die because of human-caused climate change. Yet despite their claimed fidelity to the “consensus science,” such claims are not supported by the UN’s own climate change reports.
The most alarming of the projections of climate change damages rely on naïve assumptions about human adaptability. Even if we stipulate the basic projections made in the most recent IPCC assessment, what “unchecked” climate change will probably mean is that our great-grandkids will see a smaller increase in their standard of living than they otherwise would have, if some of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could have been costlessly removed. Such a possible outcome is no reason to panic, and it doesn’t justify massive government intervention in the energy or transportation sectors.
Germany’s Energy Disaster 20 Years Later
When it comes to energy policy, legislators in Minnesota often cite Germany as an example of a shining star on a hill. This fondness for Germany probably stems from the taxpayer-funded trips that lawmakers take to experience the German Energiewende, or “Energy Transition.”
The ironic thing about their love affair with Germany is that the country’s experiment with wind and solar power has been a total disaster, resulting in skyrocketing electricity prices and a failure to produce an electric grid that emits less carbon dioxide than the United States.
Vaclav Smil, a world-renowned energy expert has said so himself. Smil’s book Energy and Civilization, was the source material I relied heavily upon “The Future of Energy.”
You can read Smil’s article on the effects of German energy policy, compared to the United States, below:
In 2000, Germany launched a deliberately targeted program to decarbonize its primary energy supply, a plan more ambitious than anything seen anywhere else. The policy, called the Energiewende, is rooted in Germany’s naturalistic and romantic tradition, reflected in the rise of the Green Party and, more recently, in public opposition to nuclear electricity generation. These attitudes are not shared by the country’s two large neighbors: France built the world’s leading nuclear industrial complex with hardly any opposition, and Poland is content burning its coal.
The policy worked through the government subsidization of renewable electricity generated with photovoltaic cells and wind turbines and by burning fuels produced by the fermentation of crops and agricultural waste. It was accelerated in 2011 when Japan’s nuclear disaster in Fukushima led the German government to order that all its nuclear power plants be shut down by 2022.
During the past two decades, the Energiewende has been praised as an innovative miracle that will inexorably lead to a completely green Germany and criticized as an expensive, poorly coordinated overreach. I will merely present the facts.
The initiative has been expensive, and it has made a major difference. In 2000, 6.6 percent of Germany’s electricity came from renewable sources; in 2019, the share reached 41.1 percent. In 2000, Germany had an installed capacity of 121 gigawatts and it generated 577 terawatt-hours, which is 54 percent as much as it theoretically could have done (that is, 54 percent was its capacity factor). In 2019, the country produced just 5 percent more (607 TWh), but its installed capacity was 80 percent higher (218.1 GW) because it now had two generating systems [emphasis added].
The new system, using intermittent power from wind and solar, accounted for 110 GW, nearly 50 percent of all installed capacity in 2019, but operated with a capacity factor of just 20 percent. (That included a mere 10 percent for solar, which is hardly surprising, given that large parts of the country are as cloudy as Seattle.) The old system stood alongside it, almost intact, retaining nearly 85 percent of net generating capacity in 2019. Germany needs to keep the old system in order to meet demand on cloudy and calm days and to produce nearly half of total demand. In consequence, the capacity factor of this sector is also low.
It costs Germany a great deal to maintain such an excess of installed power. The average cost of electricity for German households has doubled since 2000. By 2019, households had to pay 34 U.S. cents per kilowatt-hour, compared to 22 cents per kilowatt-hour in France and 13 cents in the United States.
We can measure just how far the Energiewende has pushed Germany toward the ultimate goal of decarbonization. In 2000, the country derived nearly 84 percent of its total primary energy from fossil fuels; this share fell to about 78 percent in 2019. If continued, this rate of decline would leave fossil fuels still providing nearly 70 percent of the country’s primary energy supply in 2050.
Meanwhile, during the same 20-year period, the United States reduced the share of fossil fuels in its primary energy consumption from 85.7 percent to 80 percent, cutting almost exactly as much as Germany did. The conclusion is as surprising as it is indisputable. Without anything like the expensive, target-mandated Energiewende, the United States has decarbonized at least as fast as Germany, the supposed poster child of emerging greenness.
The Historic Carbon Emissions Decline
In the seven years since 2005 energy related carbon emissions in the United States have fallen by 12%.
This decline has brought the US back to an emissions level not seen since 1994, putting it on course to achieving its target of a 17% cut on 2005 levels by 2020.
American Footprints Lowest in 50 Years
If we look at the same carbon emissions in per capita terms the recent decline looks even more impressive. Not since 1963 have average carbon emissions per person been so low in the United States.
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