When Less Warming Means More Fear

“Something curious is going on in the world of climate advocacy,” writes scholar and researcher Roger Pielke Jr. “Projected future carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion have been consistently revised downward in recent year, resulting in less projected warming. Yet rather than acknowledge this encouraging development, climate campaigners have shifted the goalposts by lowering the threshold of what they promote as apocalyptic.”

More than a decade ago, scientists forecasted global average temperature increases of 4-6 degrees Celsius by 2100. Current estimates are for an increase of less than 3 degrees Celsius, but climate campaigners have continued using the same catastrophizing rhetoric.

Pielke points out that “moving the goalposts” is running into scientific realities, such as the fact that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has not identified a “threshold of doom” or release any information equating outcomes based on current temperature projections with those of higher temperature projections made previously.

“That does not mean climate that climate change is not a problem or that continued efforts on mitigation and adaptation do not make sense. But it does mean that climate change is not the same issue it was a generation ago.”