Twenty years of scare stories in the name of climate

Looking back on more than twenty years of climate agitation, two themes emerge: a stubborn unwillingness by campaigners to acknowledge any inconvenient science, and ever-shifting favorite stories, first elevated and then dropped by the wayside. 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.

And then in the 2010s, campaigners just stopped talking about polar bears. 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. All these misguided claims add up, and have shaped the climate panic that has led to politicians passing climate legislation that now costs the world more than $2 trillion annually, for a tiny benefit.

Today, killer heat waves are the new scare story – and the latest example of willful blindness of the bigger picture. Recently, President Biden claimed “extreme heat is the number one weather-related killer in the United States.”

He is wrong by a factor of 25. While extreme heat annually kills nearly 6,000 people, cold kills 152,000 Americans each year, of which 12,000 die from extreme cold. Despite rising temperatures, age-standardized extreme heat deaths have actually declined in the US by almost ten percent per decade and globally by even more, largely because people who are more prosperous are better able to afford air conditioners.

If 6,000 heatwave deaths are a genuine priority, a sensible response would be to ensure American electricity remains cheap so it’s not just the rich who can afford to keep air conditioning running. The same policy prescription would hold if President Biden were to pay attention to the 152,000 Americans dying each year from the cold. Strokes and heart attacks spike when older people can’t afford to heat their homes through winter. Sadly, rather than keeping energy costs low, a lot of climate policy does the opposite.

It is hard not to see a pattern of climate-alarmed campaigners scaring people witless and choosing to ignore inconvenient science for as long as they can—before simply switching to a new climate fright when it becomes too awkward not to.

But scare campaigns have consequences. They leave everyone — and especially young people — distressed and despondent. Fear leads to poor policy choices, like western governments spending trillions of dollars on ineffective climate responses. And they erode the public trust, like when emphasizing heat deaths, because they fit the narrative, while ignoring much greater numbers of cold deaths.

Telling half-truths whilst piously purporting to be following the science benefits activists with their fundraising, generates clicks for media outlets, and helps politicians rally voters. But it leaves all of us poorly informed and worse off.

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".