Shrinking island, vanishing polar bears — the climate scare stories that turn out to be false

COPENHAGEN – Common sense was an early loser in the scorching battle over the reality of man-made global warming. For nearly 20 years, one group of activists argued – in the face of ever-mounting evidence – that global warming was a fabrication. Their opponents, meanwhile, exaggerated the phenomenon’s likely impact – and, as a consequence, dogmatically fixated on drastic, short-term carbon cuts as the only solution, despite overwhelming evidence that such cuts would be cripplingly expensive and woefully ineffective. (...) 

At the Glasgow climate conference, President Biden declared climate change an “existential threat to human existence as we know it.” No, it’s not. Climate change is not a meteor hurtling toward Earth to destroy humanity. Rather, it is a chronic, manageable condition humanity can live with. So argues Bjorn Lomborg, author of the book “False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet.”

Climate change has been blamed for a dizzying array of absurd woes, from the dwindling number of customers at Bulgarian brothels to the death of the Loch Ness monster. Most of us can see through these silly headlines, but it’s far harder to parse the more serious claims when they’re repeated in good faith by well-meaning campaigners.