Written by by Linnea Lueken at wattsupwiththat.com
A recent article at the New York Post by Bjorn Lomborg, titled “Shrinking island, vanishing polar bears — the climate scare stories that turn out to be false,” points out that many of the harms the mainstream media claims climate change is supposed to be causing, for example, to polar bears, the Great Barrier Reef, and Pacific island nations, have not happened. This is true. None of the catastrophes that climate alarmists crow about have come to pass.
Lomborg writes that two major themes can be seen in the last 20 years of climate change coverage from government and media: “stubborn unwillingness by campaigners to acknowledge any inconvenient science, and ever-shifting favorite stories, first elevated and then dropped by the wayside.”
He says the one constant throughout those shifting stories is “a fixation on scaring the public, which has in turn shaped bad climate policies.”
This is true; illustrated nicely by the shifting narratives surrounding global greening in particular. Years ago, the dominant narrative was that desertification, or the deaths of lush ecosystems, was our future due to climate change. This was presented as a looming catastrophe in the media and in schools. Now that decades of data show the reverse is happening, that leaf coverage is actually expanding over time amid modest warming, the alarmists say the greening is dangerous, as covered in detail in this Climate Realism post.
Lomborg explores a variety of examples illustrative of climate crisis stories that are false, and sometimes abandoned or downplayed as they have falsified by data that has emerged over time. One case study Lomborg discusses is the polar bear craze.
He writes that “after years of misrepresentation, it finally became impossible for them to ignore a mountain of evidence showing that the global polar bear population has increased substantially from around 12,000 in the 1960s to around 26,000 in the present day.”
The alarmist media has tried to claim that melting sea ice is causing more polar bear encounters and aggression towards humans. However, the simpler explanation is that there are so many more bears than there used to be, and also more human beings in areas where bears naturally live. This is another attempt for media to spin a positive (bear populations recovering from previous overhunting) into a negative.
The second false alarm case study that Lomborg discusses is the missing decline of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef (GBR) and other coral reefs.
Lomborg recalls that “scientists predicted the reef would be decimated by 2022,” and “The Guardian even published an obituary.” He points out that the GBR has more coral cover right now in 2024 than at any point in time since recordkeeping began in 1985.
“The good news gets a fraction of the coverage that the scare stories did,” Lomborg writes.