Summarised by Centrist
For more than 20 years, climate campaigners have alarmed the public with dire predictions — from polar bears disappearing to islands sinking beneath rising seas. Yet many of these claims haven’t held up.
Bjorn Lomborg contends that these scare stories rise to prominence but are quietly dropped when the data no longer supports them.
For example, polar bears were once seen as the poster child for climate catastrophe, with widespread fears that they would be wiped out by melting ice. In 2006, An Inconvenient Truth showed a polar bear stranded on melting ice, reinforcing this narrative. However, data shows the global polar bear population has more than doubled from 12,000 in the 1960s to around 26,000 today, largely because of less hunting.
A similar pattern emerged with Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. Campaigners and scientists declared that rising sea temperatures were killing off the coral, with predictions that the reef would be decimated by 2022. But the latest official data shows for the past three years, the reef has had more coral cover than ever recorded, with 2024 setting a new high. Despite this, these positive developments receive only a fraction of the attention given to the initial scare stories.
Lomborg also examines the frequent claims about Pacific islands supposedly drowning due to rising sea levels. In 2019, the UN Secretary-General visited Tuvalu, posing in water to symbolise the planet sinking. Yet, Tuvalu is actually expanding in land area and many atoll islands have been growing in size for years, with natural processes depositing new sand, outweighing the effects of sea level rise, which has been minimal in any event.
Lomborg argues politicians have spent trillions globally on climate measures with little benefit. Meanwhile, urgent issues like cold-related deaths, which vastly outnumber deaths from heat, get overshadowed by the latest climate scare.
“Scare campaigns have left us misinformed and fearful,” Lomborg concludes, “leading to poor decisions that cost the world trillions while ignoring real dangers.”
