Climate hysteria becoming a hard sell

 Joel Kotkin:

Few things in life are as predictable as the rhetoric of climate change summits like this coming week's in Glasgow. Over the next week, you will hear again and again that the planet is dying and that climate change will cause mass dislocations and starvation. The end is nigh, the UN has told us, and only green house gas reducing penance can save us.

We have been hearing this now for decades, with each global confab upping the ante, insisting that with the inevitable denouement, "not enough" is being done and what we need is to get more militant. And this despite whatever progress has been made.

The climate industrial complex, as economist Bjorn Lonborg has aptly called the climate doomsday crowd, has persuaded the media to indulge consistent exaggeration and predictions that link virtually any weather event— droughts, floods , hurricanes or heavy rains—directly to human caused climate change. As President Obama's undersecretary of energy for science, physicist Steve Koonin, pointed out, the most widely reported projections reflect only highly improbable worse case scenarios based on such things as ever growing coal usage and no significant technological improvement.

Increasingly, even climate scientists are noting that the constant, and often poorly supported doomsaying threaten the credibility of the movement itself. And there have been quiet reversals; the more extreme predictions have been abandoned or walked back, even by the UN itself. And yet, in the U.S., the vast majority of young Americans continue to believe that we face imminent environmental catastrophe. And Canadian psychologists have found elevated levels of anxiety among young people, some of whom see climate as justifying the decision to not have offspring—not surprising given that they are constantly told that their world will be coming to a catastrophic end.

Of course, some climate change is real and deserving of our attention; it needs to be addressed. But what we need to combat it is not despair, but rather, a willingness to face future climate changes of any kind, including those that may be induced by human activities, with positive effort. The environmental movement needs to give up "utopian fantasies," writes Ted Nordhaus, a longtime California environmentalist, and "make its peace with modernity and technology."

A mix of diverse options from nuclear power and hydroelectric generation to replacing coal with abundant, cleaner natural gas and geothermal, as well as entirely new innovations could reduce emissions over time without catastrophic economic and social consequences. This is particularly true in the developing world that remains critically short of reliable, affordable energy.

After all, this is not the first time humanity has confronted ecological problems. Rome, as Kyle Harper writes in his brilliant book, The Fate of Rome, experienced wide-scale climate change and a lack of water, but kept itself alive longer by inspired engineering efforts to bring water to big cities and construct roads that allowed for the movement of food into the imperial center. California, my adopted home state, dealt with its historic aridity by engineering enormous water works that led to the creation of America's technological and cultural hub, as well as the country's leading agriculture producers.

Perhaps the best model can be found in the example of the Netherlands, where catastrophic flooding in the sixteenth century prompted an extensive and successful expansion of coastal berms to prevent future floods. Meanwhile, a failure to anticipate climate changes doomed civilizations from Mesoamerica, the Indus Valley, and Cambodia. More recently, New Orleans suffered greatly from hurricanes due to lack of adequate preparations, and today California, in tow from the green left, suffers serious droughts more often not due to not only climate change but a persistent unwillingness to expand a system designed for half its current population.
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There is more.  

One of the more counterproductive moves has been the attempt by the Biden administration and others on the left to block drilling for natural gas.  The unintended result of this idiocy is the increased usage of coal to replace the missing natural gas. 

Kotkin is also right about the Chicken Littles of the climate change crows who have been giving bogus end of the world scenarios for decades.  Al Gore was given a reward for his activity that included a prediction that the poles would be ice-free by now and that places like New York City and Miami would be underwater by now.  In short, they have overrated the problem and lost credibility.