“Global warming is real, but it is not the end of the world.”
Does that statement scandalize you? It surely scandalizes the climate-alarmist lobby.
But that’s just the case Bjørn Lomborg lays out in the new cover story of National Review magazine.
“Climate change is a real and man-made phenomenon,” Lomborg writes, “and it will have negative impacts overall. That’s a fact, and it is one that we hear a lot.”
But the “catastrophe narrative” is “drowning out” the reality and the nuance of the problem — a problem that is at the end of the day manageable.
In his cover-story essay, Lomborg presents the reader with eight charts that you need to see “to understand that the climate-change data are very different from what we hear in the commonplace narrative.”
From the facts about hurricanes, to the resiliency of polar-bear populations, to the true cost of going to “net-zero” on carbon, Lomborg’s charts will surprise you, especially if all you’ve had to go on is the climate coverage on NPR or in the Washington Post.
Has the science been politicized? Of course it has. And it’s part of an ongoing pattern.
That pattern is what Christine Rosen covers in her essay, “Political Science.” When the science journal Nature took the unprecedented step of endorsing Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential race, it didn’t do much to move votes. But it did do damage to the public’s faith in the credibility of scientists. Stanford University researcher Floyd Zhang took a look at the endorsement’s effect on Trump voters. He found that “trust in the publication’s impartiality plummeted.” I’m not sure that Nature intended to produce a mistrust that “extended to those study participants’ views of science and scientists more broadly,” but that is all that its endorsement achieved.
As a subscriber, you can read both essays in the new April 17, 2023, issue of National Review.
In it, you’ll also find:
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