Yes, Follow the Data. Even if it Does Not Fit Your Agenda

When people argue we need to “follow the science” that should be true in all cases, not only in cases where the data fits one’s political preferences. 

So we have heard that the Great Barrier Reef has suffered from bleaching and other issues attributed to global warming. 

But In 2022, the Australian Institute of Marine Science reported the highest levels of coral cover across two-thirds of the Great Barrier Reef in over 36 years. If you don’t hear much about that, the issue is “why?” 

We also hear that rising sea levels will drown Pacific nations which are on islands. But an analysis of shoreline change in all 101 islands in the Pacific atoll nation of Tuvalu show a increase in land area in Tuvalu of 2.9 percent, despite sea-level rise, and land area increase in eight of nine atolls.

Rising sea levels remain an issue, but the point is that adaptation is happening. As with the Netherlands historically, seawalls and reclamation have a definite effect. Islands are not static landforms, in other words. 

The larger point is that we have to follow the real data. And sometimes the models are exaggerated. That is not to deny there are issues, simply to note that exaggeration does not help. 

The leading science journal Nature, for example, just retracted a paper that claimed “climate change”  will reduce global economic output by 62 percent by the end of the century. 

But when skeptical  researchers checked the math, they found the underlying data indicated a 23 percent loss, not 62 percent. And a 6 percent loss by 2050, not 19 percent. There is still an issue, but it might not be “existential,” the term people loosely throw around. 

Many people use the term “climate change,” but it is a term I tend not to use, as it is meaningless. Earth’s climate has always changed. 

The more-precise concepts would be the direction of change and the degree of human-caused change, taking into account mitigation steps that might actually help in some meaningful way without also harming our efforts to keep humans out of poverty, hunger and threat of disease, for example. 

In other words, if you argue we must reach “net zero” emissions, for example, many of us have to weigh that against the other human costs, which might well include lower living standards, poverty, hunger or lack of economic development, everywhere, but especially across the Global South.

None of this is to deny a problem exists. But anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change is a much smaller factor at the local and regional scale than natural climate variability, says Ted Nordhaus, director of research at The Breakthrough Institute. 

“Even in the case where climate sensitivity proves to be relatively high, additional anthropogenic warming is an order of magnitude less than the oscillations of natural variability,” he says. 

So follow the data. Always. Consistently. Even if it does not fit one’s agenda.