Prestigious institutions often treat climate change as the most consequential issue facing humanity. Some European countries have remade their economies in response to the challenge, and polls show substantial numbers of young people saying that climate change makes them less likely to have children. I don’t think we should put much stock in such surveys, as people will often latch on to ad hoc justifications for decisions they’ve already made, but the fact that pollsters even ask a question like this shows the degree to which climate change is seen as an issue of outsized importance. Just how worried should we be?
Unlike in my younger days, I am now a certified expert truster. So I don’t feel a need to try to teach myself climatology and look into whether scientists are right when they say the world is getting warmer. Becoming wise means understanding that one of the most useful heuristics one can have is “trust the experts unless there’s something obviously insane about what they’re saying.” Climate scientists seem to have a pretty good record of predictions, being able to put together graphs like this one, which comes from the NASA website.
That’s pretty good! I have no reason to doubt the scientific consensus that the world is getting warmer, and human activity is playing the dominant role in the process.
But just because something is happening and has some negative effects, it doesn’t mean that we should spend a lot of time and energy worrying about it. We need to ask how big of a problem climate change is in the grand scheme of things, and whether the solutions advocated for are worthwhile. This is especially true since we have entire nations adopting climate goals that slow economic growth, and serious people put forth proposals that would keep some of the poorest people in the world in crushing poverty for much longer.
If you’re going to look at one chart to understand why we shouldn’t worry much about climate change, it is the one below, which comes from Alex Epstein’s book Fossil Future.
For decades, environmentalists have said that climate change endangers human well-being and warned of natural catastrophes. They were right that more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would lead to higher temperatures. Yet they were completely wrong that it would directly hurt humans all that much.