In a recent article in the Independent, “Prince William warns ‘inch-by-inch’ action is not enough to stop climate change,” Prince William points at recent forest fires in the UK as evidence that climate change is devastating the globe and that the world’s peoples must make rapid, sweeping economic and social changes and sacrifices changes to prevent catastrophe. This is nonsense. The kind of civilizational overhaul Prince William insists on would be unacceptably authoritarian and would produce far more harm and death than it would prevent. Also, this year’s wildfires are a bad example to point toward as evidence of climate change since they were neither unprecedented nor part of a long-term trend.
The Prince of Wales is reported to have made a series of comments hyping an alarmist perspective of climate change, albeit an optimistic one… with a deadline of course.
The Independent writes:
Current measures are proceeding at a snail’s pace “inch by inch” and are nowhere near enough to address the problem, he said.
…
He said action must be stepped up in what is left of this decade, effectively setting a deadline of 2030, less than four years from now.
He referenced this summer’s wildfires in the UK as an example of the troubling evidence that climate change is causing dangerous weather.
The problem for Prince William is that data debunks his wildfire assertions. Data from the collaborative project between NASA and the European Space Agency, Copernicus, covering the 2002 to 2023 time period demonstrate that over the past two decades there has been no trend towards worsening wildfires in the UK. (See figure below)
If anything, the recent trend is downward.
This summer’s wildfires burned about 23,000 ha of land in the UK, which is certainly high, but not unprecedented, and is clearly not part of a long-term trend according to this dataset. Global satellite data on wildfires likewise show that they are not becoming worse or more common, but the opposite. (See figure below)
The set of solutions that Prince William suggests to prevent supposedly dangerous climate change are nebulous, nothing specific is ever promoted in the article itself. The closest we get are those promoted by his Earthshot Prize competition, which thus far have primarily focused on environmental issues like cleaning up water resources and waste management. It is unclear what exact solutions he advocates for when it comes to, as Earthshot says, “fixing the climate,” but the Prince of Wales said his favored plans “requires people willing to fund them.”
He does deserve some credit for insisting at the same time that “competition, invention, and optimism are the best means of overcoming the multiple environmental challenges facing the world.” This is true, much better than top-down government intervention. But if, as he says, the world is moving too slowly and must “take action” to stop climate change, the solutions he has in mind almost have to be authoritarian and burdensome in nature.
Unfortunately for him, but fortunately for everyone else, the most stringent net-zero policies are also the most unpopular among even climate-concerned UK and European residents. As covered at Climate Realism three years ago, a YouGov poll showed that most Europeans believe that climate change is a problem, but few are willing to agree to changes like limiting the number of children they have or stopping consuming meat in order to reach net-zero carbon dioxide.
Meanwhile, net zero policies are preventing people from obtaining life-saving technology like air conditioning and the plentiful, reliable energy needed to power it.
Prince William is behind the curve when it comes to climate change, which seems to be collapsing as a popular cause even among true believers. He is also very misinformed, most likely by the biased media, about the history of European and global wildfire occurrences. Setting yet another deadline for climate action, like the dozens of deadlines that have gone by before with no ill consequences, will not make people believe more urgently that a climate cataclysm is in the offing or that radical changes in their lifestyles are justified.
