In recent years, political entities such as the UN have supported Greta Thunberg’s vision of an impending climate apocalypse. UN Secretary General António Guterres claims that we are “firmly on track toward an unliveable world.” A former UK climate advisor wrote in the Guardian that “humanity’s survival is still in our grasp – just. But only if we take these radical steps.” As an Earth Scientist at Cambridge, and newly a College member at Advance UK, I consider these statements to be pure misinformation. Recent climate change is real and most likely to be broadly human-caused. However, there is next to no evidence of approaching catastrophe.
As I noted in a recent article in the journal Bioscience, zero published quantitative studies predict civilization-level threats from climate change. A key example of rhetoric versus reality is extreme weather. Claims of increasing frequency and danger of extreme weather events broadly lack strong scientific backing. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data show no trend in global hurricane frequency or power from 1880 to today. The Journal of Hydrology has reported a global decline in flooding. And Science Advances showed a global decline in area burned by fires. Nature Food, meanwhile, projected improvement in food security under all future climate scenarios.
Claims of rising monetary damages from extreme weather are also misleading. When normalized against GDP, relative damage in the US is actually getting smaller, says the World Meteorological Organisation’s 2023 report. So, extreme weather risks are oversold. But what about global warming?
Warming will actually reduce temperature-related deaths overall, as cold-related deaths outnumber heat-related ones by 8:1. With rising air conditioning, mortality from sub-optimal temperatures will plummet, Hannah Ritchie found in 2024. Indeed, reducing urban pollution is ultimately more pressing for health than rising temperatures, according to an entry the same year in Science of the Total Environment.
What about animals? Climate change can aggravate extinction rates, but human land and sea use changes are by far the dominant driver of biodiversity loss, Science has reported.
Hence, an absolutist focus on climate distracts us from the more important task of conserving nature at a local level. Indeed, with China emitting more CO 2 than all of Europe combined, Britain cannot make much difference to the climate – with or without the extremist policy of near-term net zero. Instead, we should aim to couple local conservation with a bright and bold future of abundant and cheap energy.
The immensely energy-hungry AI revolution will be rather hard to satisfy with wind turbines alone. Here, nuclear may be a (long-overdue) solution.
Advance UK, a new political force on the British centre right, have made it clear that they want to pursue the future I describe above. I recently joined their College to add my voice to that cause, since so few other scientists seem willing to counter the anti-scientific fear mongering of Thunberg, the UN, and broad swathes of the British Left.
As the public face down pivotal elections in the coming years, we scientists must speak up for reality in the face of obvious misinformation. The world is not ending. There is a future for our children – and, as long as we deliver prosperity, conserve our history and our nature, and build a peaceful and thriving society, that future will be nothing less than fantastic.
Dr Craig R. Walton is an Advance UK College Member and academic at the University of Cambridge