The one constant: a fixation on scaring the public, which has in turn shaped bad climate policies.
At the start of this century, the polar bear was the emblem of climate apocalypse.
Protesters dressed as polar bears, while Al Gore’s hit 2006 film “An Inconvenient Truth” showed us a sad, animated polar bear floating away to its death.
The Washington Post warned that polar bears faced extinction, and the World Wildlife Fund’s chief scientist even claimed some polar bear populations would be unable to reproduce by 2012.
Why? Because after years of misrepresentation, it finally became impossible for them to ignore a mountain of evidence showing that the global polar bear population has increased substantially from around 12,000 in the 1960s to around 26,000 in the present day. (The main reason? People are hunting a lot less polar bears).
The same thing has happened with depictions of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.
For decades, campaigners shouted that the reef was being killed off by rising sea temperatures.
After extensive damage from a hurricane in 2009, official Australian estimates of coral cover reached a low in 2012.
The media was flooded with claims of the “Great Reef Catastrophe” and scientists predicted the reef would be decimated by 2022. The Guardian even published an obituary.
The latest official statistics show a completely different picture. For the past three years, the Great Barrier Reef has had more coral cover than at any point since records began in 1985, with 2024 setting a new record.
The good news gets a fraction of the coverage that the scare stories did.
An often-recurrent climate story has been the alleged drowning of small Pacific islands due to sea level rise.
In 2019, United Nations Secretary General António Guterres flew all the way to Tuvalu for a Time magazine cover-shot.
Wearing a suit, he stood up to his thighs in the water, demonstrating “our sinking planet.” The accompanying article warned the island — and others like it — would be struck “off the map entirely” by rising sea levels.
This summer, the New York Times finally shared what it called “surprising” climate news: almost all atoll islands are increasing in size. In fact, the scientific literature has documented this trend for more than a decade.
While rising sea levels do erode land, additional sand from old coral is washed up on low-lying shores.
Extensive studies have long shown this accretion is stronger than climate-caused erosion, meaning the land area of Tuvalu is increasing.
Climate change is real. It is manmade. It is a challenge that needs sensible policies.
But campaigners do the cause a massive disservice by refusing to acknowledge evidence that challenges their intensely doom-ridden worldview.
Bjorn Lomborg is President of the Copenhagen Consensus, Visiting Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and author of “False Alarm” and “Best Things First.”
