What Polar Bears Can Teach Us

The latest alarming news about climate change is that huge swaths of densely inhabited land will be underwater by 2050, with their cities “erased.” These reports – which appeared in The New York Times and many other media outlets – are based on a good research paper by scientists at Climate Central, but they get the story wrong.

This is part of a damaging pattern. Climate change is a man-made problem that we need to tackle, but many of the news stories about its purported effects are scaring us without justification and misleading us about how to act.

We often hear the story of humans voraciously exploiting the world’s resources and living way beyond Earth’s means. On “Earth Overshoot Day”, campaigners such as the Global Footprint Network claim that, by August 2, we have already exhausted this year’s supply of natural resources and Earth is now sliding into “ecological debt” for the rest of 2017.

By September, the world’s 193 governments will meet in New York and agree on a set of ambitious, global targets for 2030. Over the next 15 years these targets will direct the $2.5 trillion to be spent on development assistance, as well as countless trillions in national budgets.