Americans, especially students, are being whipped into a panic over the allegedly existential threat of climate change. Yet the actual research, summarized in the UN’s own periodic reports and in the research of a Nobel laureate in the field, shows that at best only a modest “leaning against the wind” could be justified according to standard economic science.
You often hear the argument from climate change fanatics about how science proves that climate change is coming and the impact will be devastating. These arguments are generally in support of government efforts to curtail carbon output via carbon taxation, subsidies, etc. However, for the most part their arguments are not actually supported by the science. What science says and what the media reports it says are not quite the same thing.
If we were to follow the most aggressive proposed efforts to curtail carbon output, global warming would be reduced from 4.1 degrees Celsius to 3.5 degrees Celsius, at least according to Nobel laureate William Nordhaus whose climate model was one of the primary ones used by the Obama administration. The problem is that the media suggests his work supports implementing these aggressive carbon reductions. This, in fact, is not true.
First, a reduction from 4.1 to 3.5 degrees of warming is well above the desired 1.5 degrees. Second, and more importantly, the available science suggests that the reduction in economic output caused by such reductions would be far more devastating to humans than the warming would be. We aren't talking just about electricity being a little more expensive, we are talking about economic impacts profound enough to increase starvation, homelessness, disease, and civil unrest among other things. Finally, assuming that the worst case scenarios about climate change are true, there is far more promising science that suggests that in the near future it would be possible to reflect more sunlight and/or remove carbon from the atmosphere to accomplish the desired warming reductions.