Scared Silly About Global Warming

By Bjorn Lomborg

The continuous presentation of scary stories about global warming in the popular media makes us unnecessarily frightened. Even worse, it terrifies our kids.

Al Gore famously depicted how a sea-level rise of 20 feet (six meters) would almost completely flood Florida, New York, Holland, Bangladesh, and Shanghai, even though the United Nations estimates that sea levels will rise 20 times less than that, and do no such thing.

When confronted with these exaggerations, some of us say that they are for a good cause, and surely there is no harm done if the result is that we focus even more on tackling climate change. A similar argument was used when George W. Bush’s administration overstated the terror threat from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

But this argument is astonishingly wrong. Such exaggerations do plenty of harm. Worrying excessively about global warming means that we worry less about other things, where we could do so much more good.

We focus, for example, on global warming’s impact on malaria ― which will be to put slightly more people at risk in 100 years ― instead of tackling the half-billion people suffering from malaria today with prevention and treatment policies that are much cheaper and dramatically more effective than carbon reduction would be.

Exaggeration also wears out the public’s willingness to tackle global warming. If the planet is doomed, people wonder, why do anything? A record 54 percent of American voters now believe the news media make global warming appear worse than it really is.

A majority of people now believes ― incorrectly ― that global warming is not even caused by humans. In the United Kingdom, 40 percent believe that global warming is exaggerated and 60 percent doubt that it is manmade.

But the worst cost of exaggeration, I believe, is the unnecessary alarm that it causes ― particularly among children. Recently, I discussed climate change with a group of Danish teenagers. One of them worried that global warming would cause the planet to “explode” ― and all the others had similar fears.

In the U.S., the ABC television network recently reported that psychologists are starting to see more neuroses in people anxious about climate change. An article in the Washington Post cited nine-year-old Alyssa, who cries about the possibility of mass animal extinctions from global warming.

In her words: “I don’t like global warming because it kills animals, and I like animals.” From a child who is yet to lose all her baby teeth: “I worry about [global warming] because I don’t want to die.”

The newspaper also reported that parents are searching for “productive” outlets for their eight-year-olds’ obsessions with dying polar bears. They might be better off educating them and letting them know that, contrary to common belief, the global polar bear population has doubled and perhaps even quadrupled over the past half-century, to about 22,000.

Read the rest at The Korea Times.