Energy Sec Chris Wright seeks to set the record straight about the science
Something important happened this week, if the fuming response is anything to go by. The country is witnessing the rise—finally—of a scientifically armed and debate-ready climate right. The “consensus” gatekeepers don’t like it one bit.
The Energy Department issued a report whose title might glaze eyes: “A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate.” The New York Times, foaming with indignation, rolled out every shame word to denounce the report’s authors as “skeptics” who “misrepresent” and “cherry-pick” as they “undermine” and “attack” the “consensus.” This fury was at striking odds with the smug “we’ve won” tone of recent climate journalism.
Note what’s missing from this diatribe—a favorite word of the critics, yet one they couldn’t deploy here: “denier.” The report—written by five respected scientists, including the former chief scientific officer in the Obama Energy Department—doesn’t deny the climate is changing. Energy Secretary Chris Wright, in an opening letter, notes: “Climate change is real, and it deserves attention.”
The report instead provides a holistic picture of the messy reality of climate research—its many areas of uncertainty, disputes and unknowns. Most people never hear about this complicated debate, since only a subset of scientists with the “correct” views are given voice.
Here are a few noncontroversial findings from the report—based on peer-reviewed literature from recent years—that might surprise Times readers. Global warming has risks, but also benefits, including greater agricultural productivity. We still don’t know the extent to which human activity plays a role in warming, given natural variability, data limitations, uncertain models and fluctuations in solar activity. Models predicting what is to come remain all over the map. U.S. historical data doesn’t support claims of increased frequency or intensity of extreme weather. Climate change is likely to have little effect on economic growth. U.S. climate policies, even drastic ones, will have negligible effect on global temperatures.
This is the honest, modest assessment of the state of climate science today. Which explains the climate activists’ fury, since it is at odds with the controlled story of “mass extinction” and “end of glaciers” and “deathly heat waves” that the “consensus” gatekeepers obsessively enforce. Complete control over that scientific narrative has been essential to their ability to manipulate debate and, under Joe Biden’s presidency, gear the entire government to “fighting” the “threat.”
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It couldn’t come soon enough. What’s become obvious in recent years—thanks to the taste of it we got with the Biden administration—is that climate hysteria is one of the greatest threats to freedom in modern times. The more cynical of its promoters seized on it for that reason—as a justification for total power. If day-to-day human activity is causing the Earth to melt, government must control the day-to-day: what we drive, what we eat, what products we buy, what industries exist (and don’t), where we live. Anyone who disagrees with the regime’s reigning narrative—the collective requirement to address the “existential” threat—is branded the climate version of an “enemy of the people”: a “denier.” It’s corrosive.
The right this week debuted its new strategy, and Americans received the bigger scientific picture. Long may that healthy, vigorous debate—the essence of good science—continue.
