OPINION:
Trust underpins human enterprise, and its quality affects the well-being of us all. When political and thought leaders settle on a relentless narrative of a coming climate catastrophe, it is trust — or the lack thereof — that governs whether their countdown warnings are considered trustworthy, or they are simply shining us on.
Last week, the United Nations issued a fresh report of approaching climate change doom. The work of the world body’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, its import was enunciated in grave tones by U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres: “The climate time bomb is ticking. But today’s IPCC report is a how-to guide to defuse the climate time bomb. It is a survival guide for humanity.”
Carbon dioxide emissions from human activity, currently at their highest levels in 2 million years, must be remediated by 2050 — preferably by 2040, the assessment warns. Only then will global temperatures be prevented from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by 2100 and Earth’s future be secured.
Climate warnings such as the U.N.’s are easier to launch into the public sphere than to land on target, though. Former Vice President Al Gore earned a reputation as a prophet of climate change on the merits of his 2006 film “An Inconvenient Truth.” Since then, though, he has been embarrassed by the emergence of inconvenient facts.
In 2009, for example, Mr. Gore said there was “a 75% chance the entire north polar ice cap, during some of the summer months, could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years.” It was not so in 2016, nor is it so in 2023. Oops.
Mr. Gore, whose lucrative green projects have prospered on the urgency of his predictions, also claimed in 2006 that the melting ice would raise ocean levels as much as 20 feet “in the near future.” It has taken a century for seas to creep up 6 to 8 inches, according to NASA, which forecasts another 2 feet of water by 2100. At the current rate, though, the supposed “near future” problem that coastal cities must face won’t culminate until around the year 3000.
As the voice of Generation Z, Swedish celebrity Greta Thunberg, all of 20 years old, has garnered worldwide fame for crying out at insensitive contemporaries of Mr. Gore to quit wrecking the planet for future generations. The angry environmentalist in 2018 tweeted, “A top climate scientist is warning that climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years.”
Careful reading of her tweet finds that “five years” refers to a deadline for banning fossil fuels rather than for avoiding human extinction. With the arrival of 2023, though, her supposed zero hour has expired, and those purportedly harmful fuel sources still power the essentials of human well-being. Another oops. Ms. Thunberg quietly deleted her tweet because even her young followers still learning to distinguish fact from fiction are not fully bereft of common sense.
The concerned public can be forgiven for pondering whether the “climate time bomb” prognosticators are trustworthy. And if they wonder how long they must suspend their disbelief, the answer, evidently, is as long as it takes.
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