“We do have the opportunity to be the first generation that builds a sustainable world,” says 30-year-old Scottish data scientist Hannah Ritchie at the University of Oxford. “Let’s take it.”
Ritchie has become a leading figure in a group of scientists and analysts who are pushing back at the currently dominant apocalyptic warnings about a warming world climate, which many claim is an “existential” threat. Ritchie and others believe that the world is making progress in dealing with global warming and that optimism is warranted.
Ritchie does not deny that the world is warming, and that the consequences aren’t favorable. The problem is the extravagant rhetoric surrounding the topic. Some warming deniers say it’s all a political fraud, manufactured by liberal elites justify socialism. Others insist on throwing around the term “existential,” implying that a warmer world means the end of our species, or at least freezing together in caves. Neither outcome is realistic.
In a TED talk, Ritchie said, “It’s become strangely normal to tell our kids that they’re going to die from climate change. If sea-level rise doesn’t get them, then a wildfire will, or a global famine, or crop failures. Maybe a fatal heat wave, the insect apocalypse or the fishless oceans. These are the headlines we’ve all been told will be the end of humanity.”
She added, “But I’m a data scientist, and after years poring over the data on how far humanity’s come and how quickly things are now moving, my perspective on this has changed. I think we’ve got this framing upside down. Far from being the last generation, I think we will be the first generation: the first generation to be sustainable.”
Ritchies new book, “Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet,” Ritchie lays out the case for climate optimism. In a 2022 interview, she told Bookseller magazine, “But if we zoom out and look at the data, we can see the massive strides we have already made. In this book, I want to show not only where we’ve come from, but lay out a vision of how we build a sustainable world for this generation and those that follow.”
Among the facts – Richie’s data – that confound the doomsday rhetoric: solar and wind power prices have plunged and are being installed rapidly as coal recedes into the background, deforestation rates have slowed, natural disaster-related deaths are lower than they used to be.
Also, as another data-crunching climate optimist, University of Colorado professor Roger A. Pielke Jr. has shown conclusively, using data from the federal government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, extreme climate events in the U.S., often casually and causally linked in the media to climate change, show no historic trends. Hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, floods, drought, no trends, although temperatures are rising. So is sea level, but Al Gore’s vision of catastrophic waves of seawater flowing down the streets of New York, a convenient fantasy.
In his Substack newsletter The Honest Broker, Pielke recently provocatively asked, “Was the global climate of 1850-1900 really so great?” There is little climate data available further back than a hundred years, so many presume that the “pristine” preindustrial climate should be the goal of modern policymakers.
Pielke cites the 2017 book “Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making if the Third World,” by the late social historian Mike Davis to debunk that assumption. Pielke says, “I was aware of the 1877-78 El Niño event and its profound impacts, but I never connected its significance to the contemporary climate discourse until recently.”
Davis book estimated that some 50 million people died in the mid-1870s due to extreme weather and climate, 4% of the world’s population. That equates to “over 320 million” people today, or the entire population of the U.S.
What accounts for the massive fatalities of the 1870s? A strong El Niño and callous, indifferent, Malthusian governments. A British finance minister of the time said, “[E]very benevolent attempt made to mitigate the effects of famine and defective sanitation serves but to enhance the evils resulting from over-population.”
Pielke concludes. “This cursory overview of various events of the 1870s indicates that notion that the period 1850 to 1900 was somehow safer or less extreme in terms of climate extremes and impacts is simply false.”
Canary Media, which does a fine job of tracking the response to global warming, recently listed “Six reasons to be optimistic about the energy transition.”
- “The solar PV revolution is here – and eating away at fossil fuels every day.
- The economics are on the side of climate solutions.
- Heat pumps keep proving how much better they are than gas alternatives.
- Climate-focused media continues to raise the bar.
- Major steps toward mitigating emissions from cargo shipping.
- Energy storage promised big things in 2023, and it delivered.”
Climate optimism also has its own academic journal, The Climate Optimist, published since 2019 by Harvard’s Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment. The Harvard center describes itself: Our mission is to deliver solutions-based research and use education and outreach to shape climate actions that improve the health of our most vulnerable populations like children, seniors, and environmental justice communities.
–Kennedy Maize