Climate Change: How Lucky Do You Feel?
THE AGE OF climate panic is here,” declared David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (Tim Duggan Books), in a February 2019 New York Times op-ed. He’s certainly right about the panic. University of Cumbria Professor of Sustainability Leadership Jem Bendell predicts that man-made climate change will result in a “collapse in society” in about 10 years. Novelist Jonathan Franzen has warned that it will soon produce “massive crop failures, apocalyptic fires, imploding economies, epic flooding, hundreds of millions of refugees fleeing regions made uninhabitable by extreme heat or permanent drought.”
Are they right?
My first article in Reason related to global warming appeared in 1992. It was a report on the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, where the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was negotiated. By signing the treaty, I noted, the “United States is officially buying into the notion that ‘global warming’ is a serious environmental problem” even as “more and more scientific evidence accumulates showing that the threat of global warming is overblown.”
But in subsequent decades, as I continued to cover the science and policy of global warming, I began slowly—too slowly for some—to change my mind. In 2006, I wrote that “I now believe that balance of evidence shows that global warming could well be a significant problem.”
I have spent the last several months revisiting the question, trying to figure out if
