What if the scariest climate predictions are more fiction than fact?
The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) aims to highlight the urgent threats climate change poses. It projects severe consequences, including longer and more intense urban heat waves, as the World Resources Institute noted, along with increased storms, floods, and crop failures. IPCC claims that our current path leads to a temperature increase of at least three degrees Celsius above pre-industrial (circa 1750-1850) levels if the world does not drastically reduce carbon dioxide or just carbon emissions. However, this assessment and the attendant predictions are dubious.
The first uncertainty is the pre-industrial global temperatures. There were no precise thermometers at random sites or in major towns until late in the 19th century. Therefore, researchers use ice cores and lake and sea sediments as proxies. The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration admits that pre-1880 data are limited. It provides many examples showing how even modern temperatures can be incomparable from region to region and from past to present and consequently are adjusted to approximate comparability.
What cannot be explained away is the Medieval Warm Period, which lasted from about 800 AD to around 1300 AD, and the subsequent cooling period that ‘bottomed’ about 1700 AD called the Little Ice Age. Human activity did not cause either one, and they were not merely regional phenomena confined to the North Atlantic and Western Europe. In the Middle Ages, Vikings settled in Greenland and were able to grow crops. The weather cooled dramatically, and they abandoned their colonies in the 15th century. During the Little Ice Age, there were many crop failures and famines in Europe, and the river Thames reliably froze over, with ice thick enough to hold winter fairs on.
Temperatures did not rise significantly until well into the 19th century. Suppose the recent temperature increase between one and one and one-half degrees Celsius is correct. This is only a third of the way toward a more tolerable (i.e., more livable, with less disease and fewer cold-related deaths) climate and cannot be termed “global boiling,” as the Secretary-General of the United Nations called it in 2023.
At three or more degrees of warming, IPCC researchers (“Climate Change 2023 Synthesis Report: Summary for Policymakers Sixth Assessment Report,” “AR6” pp. 15-16) have “high confidence” in more severe hurricanes, typhoons and cyclones; large floods; deadlier heatwaves and droughts; lower glacier-fed river flow; and lower crop yields.
Yet, their predictions are vague and generalized. So far, there are few signs that these calamities are increasing in frequency or intensity – hurricanes, cyclones, and typhoons are not. Indeed, humanity is coping well: The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization observed that 2024 grain production was the second-highest on record.
Here are a few erroneous predictions the New American found: the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP)’s 2005 warning of 50 million climate refugees by 2010; the University of East Anglia’s 2000 prediction that the United Kingdom would rarely have snow in winter; and several early-2000s prognostications of the Arctic Ocean being ice-free in summer by 2016 – none has happened. A critique from May of 2020 of the thirty-eight models used to predict futures observed that the predictions of the amalgamated model used by the IPCC consistently and substantially overestimated actual warming.
Longer and hotter heat waves in cities are not the end of the world. They are unpleasant but manageable. Practical methods of urban cooling are spreading globally. Heat-related deaths are still far fewer than those from cold (by a ten-to-one ratio). If it gets hotter occasionally, humanity can and will survive.
Ian Madsen is the Senior Policy Analyst at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
