A critique of the apocalyptic climate narrative

According to the Apocalyptic climate narrative, humanity faces an existential threat from global warming that can be averted only by aggressive suppression of fossil-fuel use. The narrative has been promoted by environmental activists, prominent politicians, and the United Nations for more than three decades and has been accepted as gospel truth by many citizens of the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and other wealthy countries. Alarming narratives that have an aura of plausibility can be highly effective tools for shaping public opinion and public policies. When such narratives are false or seriously misleading, they can do significant damage because of unintended consequences of their policy prescriptions. For example, an alarming narrative—rooted in a false, but plausible-sounding, analogy between the risks of nuclear power plants and nuclear bombs—helped turn public opinion against nuclear power and thereby induced much greater use of coal over the last 50 or so years.1 The substitution of coal for nuclear power shortened millions of lives (due to greater air pollution) and led to higher CO2 emissions than would have otherwise occurred. These unintended consequences of the anti-nuclear-power narrative should make us think carefully before the United States goes too far down the energy path prescribed by the Apocalyptic climate narrative. This paper details the flaws in the Apocalyptic climate narrative, including why the threat from human-caused climate change is not dire and why urgent suppression of fossil-fuel use would be unwise. We argue that sensible public policies would focus instead on developing a diversified portfolio of energy sources to support greater resilience and flexibility to respond to whatever weather and climate extremes might occur. We identify nine principles for sensible US public policies toward energy and discuss implications of the flaws in the narrative for investors and their agents. Hypothesized damaging consequences of global warming include: (i) loss of life from greater intensity and frequency of heat waves, hurricanes, floods, droughts, and wildfires, and (ii) economic losses from such extreme-weather events and from sea-level rise due to melting polar ice caps. Assessments of the impact from human-caused warming are complicated by the difficulty of determining the extent to which observed temperature increases are caused by natural climate variability—a difficulty that adds to the uncertainty in estimates of how much human-caused warming to expect over the 21st century. The question of whether global warming is dangerous (whatever its cause) can be addressed by examining the behavior of the climate since before the time human activity generated large amounts of greenhouse-gas emissions. Human-caused global warming is typically measured with reference to pre-industrial times; for practical reasons in terms of the availability of data, the usual approach employs a baseline period in the late 19th century. Since the late 19th century, Earth's average temperature has increased by about 1.3°C (2.3°F). During the same period, average global sea level has risen 8–9 inches, and there has been little or no detectable change in most types of extreme weather events when measured against the background of natural weather and climate variability. Since the late 19th century, with 1.3°C of global warming, humanity has seen unprecedented increases in prosperity and well-being. Global population has increased from about 1.6 billion in 1900 to 8.2 billion people in 2024. In 1900, the global average lifespan was 34 years; in 2024 the global average lifespan more than doubled to 73 years. From 1961 to 2020, global agricultural output nearly quadrupled, with a 53% increase in per capita output despite a 2.6-fold increase in global population. Since the early 1900s, per capita mortality from hurricanes, floods, droughts, and wildfires has decreased by almost 98%.2 These favorable trends in weather- and climate-related mortality rates reveal that the world is now much better at preventing deaths from extreme weather and climate events than it was a century ago. The sharp reduction in death rates has been accomplished through greater wealth (driven by energy derived from fossil fuels), which provides better infrastructure, superior advance-warning technologies, and greater capacity to recover from weather-related disasters. Although the role of higher temperatures and atmospheric CO2 concentrations in these favorable changes in mortality rates is open to debate, two aspects of the increases are unambiguously beneficial. First, satellite observations since the 1980s indicate widespread greening of the planet. The satellite data show that, over the last two decades, Earth has increased its green leaf area by approximately 5%. This greening reflects increased CO2 fertilization, warmer temperatures, and more rainfall.3 The second aspect relates to heat and cold extremes. An unambiguous consequence of global warming is more frequent heat extremes, coupled with less frequent cold extremes. It is well known that mortality is substantially greater (almost a factor of 10) for extreme cold than for extreme heat.4 Consequently, rising temperatures are associated with a net saving of lives owing to the reduction of mortality from extreme cold events. Heat-related mortality is also declining over time, owing to general improvements in health care systems, increasing prevalence of residential air conditioning, and behavioral changes—factors that have dominated any impact of a warmer planet on the risk of heat-related death.5 Although the dollar value of damages from extreme weather events is now greater than it was many decades ago, this increase is the result of increasing vulnerability and exposure associated with greater population and concentration of wealth in coastal and other disaster-prone regions. A recent analysis summarizing many studies finds no evidence to support claims that any part of the overall increase in global economic losses from weather and climate disasters can be attributed to global warming.6 What about warming over the rest of the 21st century? Is there reason to expect dire consequences for humanity going forward in time? The Apocalyptic climate narrative and the most extreme impacts are driven by extreme emissions scenarios, with 4–5°C of warming by 2100 (above a baseline in the late 19th century). However, since 2021, the UN's climate negotiators have abandoned extreme emissions scenarios as unrealistic for two reasons. First, they make unrealistic assumptions, especially about coal use. Second, actual emissions have been tracking well below their most extreme emission scenario, and indeed slightly below their medium emissions scenario. The UN is now working with an estimated year 2100 warming of 2.5°C,7 while the IEA Roadmap to NetZero projects 2.4°C of warming by 2100.8 When plausible scenarios of natural climate variability and values of climate sensitivity on the lower end of the UN's IPCC likely range are considered, the expected warming could be significantly lower.9 If we work with 2.5°C projected warming by 2100, more than half (1.3°C) of the predicted increase in temperature has already occurred. There are good reasons to expect continued advances in prosperity and well-being over the remainder of the 21st century—and ample reasons such as AI to expect such advances to accelerate. Moreover, the so-called threshold of danger of 2°C warming since pre-industrial times is not an objective threshold of danger. Rather, 2°C is a politically negotiated target designed to motivate broad-based actions to reduce emissions.10 Importantly, there is no credible case that missing the 2°C target would pose an existential risk to humanity. Humans have adapted to (and thrived in) climates extremes far worse than in the pessimistic extreme scenario, as summertime residents of Phoenix and wintertime residents of Minneapolis demonstrate every year. Two other risk-related points are relevant here. First, a basic assumption in the socioeconomic scenarios used in formulating the UN climate-assessment reports is that vulnerability to weather and climate extremes decreases with greater wealth and economic development, as adaptive capacity increases. All of the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) scenarios constructed for the most recent UN climate assessment entail dramatic growth, with global GDP in 2100 between four and ten times larger than in 2010.11 These scenarios do not imply any futures for humanity that are worse than today. Second, risks from human-caused global warming are difficult to separate credibly from natural weather and climate variability and the risks to a large degree reflect the vulnerabilities of less-developed countries and poorer populations generally. Increasing wealth and productivity will continue to reduce humanity's vulnerability to weather- and climate-related risks. Uncertainty about the impact on humans of continued use of fossil fuels is dominated by the difficulties of estimating the likelihood of catastrophic outcomes from climate tipping points that could cause severe and possibly irreversible damage. Climate tipping points are defined as abrupt or nonlinear transitions to a different climate state, which are hypothesized to occur once some threshold has been crossed, with regional or global consequences that are largely uncontrollable and beyond our management. In other words, tipping points are points of no return, at least on the century timescale. In recent geologic history, abrupt climate change has been caused by changes in ocean circulation patterns and ice-sheet dynamics, including (i) the Younger Dryas (12,900–11,700 years ago) when global temperatures dropped by up to 15°C in some regions, (ii) an unnamed sudden cooling event that occurred around 8200 years ago and that lasted about 150 years, and (iii) the Dansgaard-Oeschger Events (115,000–11,500 years ago) with a series of abrupt warmings and cooling during the last Ice Age with temperature shifts of 5–10°C occurring within decades. The IPCC Assessment Reports have considered a number of potential tipping points associated with global warming, including ice-sheet collapse, collapse of the Atlantic Overturning Circulation, carbon release from permafrost thawing, and destruction of the Amazon rainforest and coral reefs. There are some preliminary climate model simulations for some of these conjectured tipping points. However, climate models do not include the appropriate physical, chemical, and biological processes to adequately simulate such events. Hence, these hypothesized climate tipping points have been based largely upon the consideration of imperfect analogues from the geologic past, process models, and physically based storylines. The likelihood of any of the above types of hypothesized tipping points occurring in the 21st century under the medium emissions scenario is generally regarded as low, although there is also low confidence in any conclusions surrounding possible tipping points owing to deep (Knightian) uncertainties in our understanding of the complex climate system. Could something genuinely catastrophic happen to the climate on the timescale of the 21st century? Yes, although continued use of fossil fuels is not the only possible cause. For example, a climate catastrophe could also be caused by nuclear war, a series of natural shifts in ocean circulation shifts in ice-sheet driven by geologic It is to sources of climate-related and it would be to to to low climate with policy actions that would on humanity. 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