By Noah Jenkins
St. Cloud High School, Senior
Imagine a barren landscape scarred by the sun with an intensity never before seen by man. Imagine coastal communities wiped off the map by cataclysmic storms and the ever-looming threat of rising seas. Imagine rivers and other waterways devolving into muddy trickles, leaving millions—if not more—at risk of their faucets running dry. This is a reality none of us wish to face but, unfortunately, is what we are destined for, lest we take bold action to save our Earth.
Nearly all of us have come over the years to accept and understand the above scenario as being fact, a truth only the uneducated would dare deny. For those my age, in Generation Z, this message has been preached to us in school, through the media, and in movies—most recently in Netflix’s Don’t Look Up—so much so that besides being our number one social concern as reported by CNBC in 2021, it has led to nearly 60 percent of youth feeling extremely worried about an impeding climatic doomsday, as reported in a BBC report from the same year, with one 16-year-old respondent even noting: “It’s different for young people—for us, the destruction of the planet is personal.”
In my experience encountering much of the messaging regarding climate change, I have always been generally skeptical given the grandiose claims many by the likes of Greta Thunberg have made, but the fact such claims are now having a demonstrated impact on the mental health of an entire generation—not to mention the great sums governments around the world are preparing (and have begun) to spend in the name of climate change reduction—only gives further credence to the idea we should be careful in accepting all these claims we have for too long accepted as truth. The stakes are far too high.
To be clear, my purpose here is not to argue against climate change as a concept, but rather the mass hysteria that has been generated around it. The climate, as we know, is constantly changing, now with anthropogenic influences; but the labeling of this change as an “emergency” instead of, say, a phenomenon is how the negative externalities, discussed before, develop.
Perhaps the best place to begin is by scrutinizing the apocalyptic end many environmentalists constantly tout. On an episode of The Andrew Neil Show, climate activist Zion Lights, in response to being asked about the lack of scientific evidence of such an end, struggled for an answer, resorting to saying that “mass migration” and other factors would lead to billions of deaths. The host, Neil, rightfully pushed back, acknowledging the factors she listed were bad but not to the proportion that she and her type make them out to be.
This example highlights a logical flaw I often notice with environmentalists. Quite similar to the correlation-doesn’t-equal-causation concept, many see the projections for a warming climate, see current issues that can intuitively be linked to climate, and then conclude that a warming climate will cause a likewise increase in the scale of those climate-related issues. This seems like a rather nit-picky point however much of the time such claims are completely removed from the science.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body of the United Nations, demonstrates this, admitting there is “limited evidence that climate change or sealevel rise is the direct cause” of current mass migration issues, as Lights alluded to. Just because mass migration can be reasonably linked to the climate does not mean a warming climate must lead to a more dire migratory crisis.
Hurricanes and storm strength, an argument quite familiar to us Floridians, is similarly misrepresented, with the commonly repeated claim of hurricanes increasing in number being questionable, given a study published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society that examined hurricanes from 1900 to 2017 that found a slight decline in number, with “no [statistically] significant trends” at best. Similarly, as Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg explains, “the increases in strong hurricanes you’ve heard so much about are ‘not part of a century-scale increase, but a recovery from a deep minimum in the 1960s–1980s,’” citing a Nature piece.
Of course, these are just two examples, and I do not claim to extrapolate these two to all the claims made about climate change. Hopefully, though, it is clear that the climate situation is much more nuanced than we’ve been told, but what about the claims that very much could be true? Just as it would be imprudent to assume the climate alarmists are completely correct, so would it be to do the same for the skeptics. So, assuming the primary claims of environmentalists are true, what then?
Without getting into the specific benchmarks and projections given, as they vary, the common thread between nearly all the prominent climate change forecasts is that the temperature and water level increases are happening at a relatively slow rate—relative to how we experience them—and, thus, have impacts that, at the greatest extent, will be realized deep into the future. Understanding “billions” of people aren’t going to die in a terrible undoing of our planet with this fact truly destroys the notion of this situation being an “emergency.” Simply put, humans, as we always have, will adapt—and it doesn’t require a large-scale government intervention either. But that is an entirely separate discussion.
For now, fellow Gen Z-ers and other concerned citizens, please don’t panic and start your doomsday plans. Being environmentally conscious and good stewards of our only home are, of course, virtues that should be maintained, but not to the extent that it stresses us out or causes many of our resources to be diverted. We have decades (or even centuries!) to sort out what may not even pan out to be a significant issue. After all, look around you. We have much greater (immediate!) issues to deal with.
This content is sponsored by Underground Refuse Systems of Kissimmee.
