BARRY BRILL: Polar Bears, Shrinking Islands & Other Climate Fictions

Media tales of doom never pan out, but meantime they leave us poorly informed and feed bad policy.

For many years now, our mainstream media have run regular stories about possible future horrors that just “might” arise from human-caused climate change. But they seldom tell us when these speculations later turn out to be nonsense.

A US think-tank has collected “50 years of failed eco-apocalyptic predictions”. So far, none of the forecasts which included due dates have actually come to pass – not a single one!

Polar Bears

A recent Wall Street Journal op-ed asks: what happened to polar bears? They used to be all climate campaigners could talk about, but now they’re essentially absent from headlines.

Protestors used to dress up in polar bear suits. The icon for Al Gore’s 2006 film “An Inconvenient Truth” was a sad cartoon polar bear floating away to his death.

Then in the 2010s campaigners stopped talking about them. After years of misrepresentation, it finally became impossible to ignore the plain fact that the global polar-bear population has risen from around 12,000 in the 1960s to about 26,000 now.

Dead Coral

Dr Bjorn Lomborg says the same thing has happened with activists’ outcries about Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

For years, they shouted that the reef was being killed off by rising sea temperatures. After extensive cyclone damage, the percentage of the reef covered in coral reached a record low in 2012. The media ran endless stories about the great reef catastrophe and a group of climate scientists predicted the coral cover would be reduced by another half by 2022. The Guardian even published an obituary in 2014.

The latest official statistics show a completely different picture. For the past three years the Great Barrier Reef has had more coral cover than at any point since records began in 1986, with 2024 setting a new record. This good news gets a fraction of the coverage that the panicked predictions received.

Sinking Pacific Islands

Then there have been the data-free warnings that small Pacific Islands would drown as sea levels surge.

In 2019, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres flew all the way to Tuvalu for a Time Magazine cover shot. Wearing a suit, he stood up to his thighs in the sea behind the headline “Our Sinking Planet”. The accompanying article warned the island – and others like it – would be struck “off the map entirely” by rising sea levels.

This year, the New York Times (a leading climate alarmist) finally shared what it called “surprising” climate news: Forty years of satellite photography show almost all atoll islands are either stable or increasing in size.

In fact, the scientific literature has been documenting this for more than a decade – with much of the research led by Auckland University’s Professor Paul Kench. While slowly rising sea levels do erode land, additional sand from old coral is washed up on low-lying shores. Extensive studies have long shown this accretion is stronger than sea level-caused erosion, meaning the land area of Tuvalu and most other small islands is increasing.

Thanks to a massive aid effort by Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology – the Pacific Sea Level and Geodetic Monitoring Project (PSLGM) – accurate readings of tide gauges in 14 Pacific Island countries are now published on a public website every hour of every day. These gauges employ state-of-the-art geodetic technology to measure vertical land movements at gauge sites, so scientists know that any changes genuinely relate to sea levels. They can show with full confidence that there has been no acceleration of Pacific sea level rise during the 21st century.

Cynical Deception

Just last month, Sr Guterres returned to the Pacific to help make a video of “actual sea level rise” occurring at Tutuila Island in American Samoa.

Everybody in Samoa knows that this unfortunate island has been sinking at the rate of about 1 inch per year since an 8.1 magnitude earthquake in September 2009. The absolute altitude of its coastline is steadily decreasing. So the rapid changes in its relative sea levels are entirely caused by seismic subsidence and have nothing at all to do with local climate or absolute sea levels.

Yet Guterres carefully omits any reference to these key facts in his propaganda  video. The purpose of this footage is to deceive.

The Secretary-General then flew to the Pacific Forum in Tonga, where he showed his video and portentously declared:

 "A worldwide catastrophe is putting this Pacific paradise in peril…The ocean is overflowing… This crisis will soon swell to an almost unimaginable scale, with no lifeboat to take us back to safety.”

The blatancy of this lie is breathtaking. The Secretary-General is one of the most visible people in the world. He was accompanied by an entourage of media, most of them specialist environmental reporters, who are well are of Tutuila’s history of instability and subsidence. They are surely aware that climate science has firmly rebutted the old canards about islands being engulfed by rising seas.

And yet, somehow, the Secretary-General, knew that he could get away with this mendacity. He was, rightly, confident that nobody would call him out.

Heat Waves

Of all the extreme weather events attributed by the media to global warming, the frequency of heat waves stands alone in being recognised by the 2021 report of the UN Climate Panel.

But this recognition takes no account of the fact that global warming is a two-edged sword. More warmth means less cold and cold is worse.

In July, President Biden claimed that “extreme heat is the No. 1 weather-related killer in the United States.” He was wrong by a massive margin – while heat kills 9,500 Americans each year, cold kills 152,000.

Despite rising temperatures, age-standardised extreme-heat deaths have actually declined in the U.S. by almost 10% a decade and globally by even more, largely because the world is growing more prosperous.

The petrified tone of heat-wave coverage twists policy illogically. Whether from heat or cold, the most sensible way to save people from temperature-related deaths would be to ensure access to cheap, reliable electricity. That way, it wouldn’t be only the rich who could afford to keep safe from blistering or frigid weather. Unfortunately, much of climate policy makes affordable energy all the harder to obtain. 

The mainstream media do the world a massive disservice by refusing to acknowledge facts that challenge their intensely doom-ridden worldview. Climate economics generally find that the costs of human-caused climate change will eventually exceed its benefits, but the net result will be nowhere near catastrophic. But the costs of all the extreme policies campaigners push for are much worse. All told, politicians across the world are now spending more than $2 trillion annually—far more than the estimated cost from climate change that these policies aim to prevent each year.

As Dr Lomborg concludes:

“Telling half-truths while piously pretending to “follow the science” benefits activists with their fundraising, generates clicks for media outlets, and helps climate-concerned politicians rally their bases. But it leaves all of us poorly informed and worse off.”

Postscript:

While no politician or journalist attending the Pacific Forum called out the duplicity of Mr Guterres, the New Zealand Foreign Minister was clearly uneasy. When asked to confirm that climate change is caused by humans, Rt Hon Winston Peters mildly suggested that natural events like volcanic activities also contributed. When he pointed out that "there are a number of Pacific islands that are actually growing”, uproar ensued throughout Oceania.

Prime Minister Christopher Luxton eventually turned down the heat with the mendacious mantra that both he and Peters believed that “climate change is an existential threat to the Pacific Islands”

Barry Brill OBE JP LL.M(Hons) M.ComLaw is a former MP and Minister of Energy, Petrocorp director, and chair of the Gas Council, Power NZ, ESANZ, and EMCO. He is presently the Chairman of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition.