A Welcome Gaffe: White House Lets Some Climate Truth Slip Out”

Steve Koonin’s just wrote an op ed for the Wall Street Journal.

The world of climate change discourse seems to have taken a surprisingly truthful turn, with the White House accidentally letting some facts slip through the net of alarmism. In a delightful gaffe that Michael Kinsley would be proud of, the U.S administration has published a report undermining the oft-hyped narrative of a looming climate catastrophe.

Steven E. Koonin, a distinguished professor at New York University, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and an author whose work “Unsettled” gives an insightful look into the murkier depths of climate science, unravels the details of this report in an article published in the Wall Street Journal. He is adept at exposing the emperor’s lack of clothes in the realm of climate alarmism.

The White House report, a joint production of the Council of Economic Advisers and the Office of Management and Budget, aimed to outline the potential economic impacts of climate change on the U.S. economy. The first graph from the report, reproduced in Koonin’s article, displays twelve independent peer-reviewed estimates of how America’s GDP would potentially decline due to rising global temperatures.

Surprise, surprise! The estimates all point towards an economic impact of less than a few percentage points for a few degrees of warming. The consensus, barring two extreme outliers, suggests that the current warming of 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit has led to a GDP reduction of less than 0.5%. When seen against the backdrop of an 800% growth in real GDP since 1950, this figure could easily be dismissed as a statistical hiccup.

Even under the United Nation’s climate panel’s projection of a 4.5 degrees increase by 2100, the consensus predicts a GDP reduction of less than 2%. If one is to assume a steady annual GDP growth rate of 1.5% for the next 80 years, the net growth clocks at 232%. The minuscule 2% dent due to climate change reduces the growth to 225%. As Koonin aptly puts it, such a difference lies “in the noise.”

The business of combining economic modeling with climate modeling seems akin to walking a tightrope over a pit of uncertainties and untestable assumptions. The White House report is careful to outline its caveats, acknowledging the uncertainties, uneven impacts across sectors and regions, and the limitations of GDP as the sole measure of climate’s effect. It’s refreshing to see a hint of reason in a sea of alarmist narratives.

But here’s the kicker: The report conveniently omits America’s remarkable ability to adapt and even flourish under changing climate conditions. The U.S. mainland, excluding Alaska and Hawaii, has warmed about 2 degrees Fahrenheit since 1901. In that period, the nation has experienced a population boom, drastic increase in life expectancy, and a sevenfold increase in per capita economic activity.

Predictions of further warming in the next century are treated with doomsday zeal by climate alarmists. However, our past experience should lead us to believe that any climate changes will be more a minor inconvenience than an existential threat. The fear mongering around irreversible changes such as the disintegration of the Greenland ice sheet, projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, seems disproportionate considering their minimal effect on the global economy.

The report further dampens the alarmist rhetoric by projecting how little future greenhouse-gas emissions are likely to affect the U.S. economy in the coming decades. Two extreme scenarios – one achieving net-zero emissions by 2075, and the other an unlikely high-emissions scenario – show a mere 1.4% difference in the projected “debt-to-GDP ratio” by mid-century. Such minor difference is, yet again, merely “in the noise.”

This report deserves commendation for delivering some potentially unwelcome messages and injecting a dose of reality into the climate discourse. It’s high time that the Biden administration and its climate-activist allies reassess their apocalyptic rhetoric, acknowledge the facts laid out in their own report, and cancel the imagined climate crisis.

Let’s hope this gaffe isn’t just a one-time event but rather the start of a trend towards an honest, fact-based discussion on climate change and its impacts. As Koonin rightly points out, exaggerating the magnitude, urgency, and certainty of the climate threat only encourages disruptive and costly policies that could prove more harmful than any change in the climate itself.