Public policy arguments should always be fact-based.
Now, at this juncture, all of you reading this - and since you're reading RedState, you're already a cut above the main run of news readers/viewers - you're wondering why I am once again belaboring the obvious. But the fact is that few public policy discussions these days seem to be fact-driven, and never is this more true than when climate scolds are involved. The British Broadcasting Corporation, or BBC, is a haven for climate scolds. In a recent online article, the BBC claims that American salaries have decreased by 12 percent, thanks to climate change. There's just one problem with their claim, and I'll phrase it in a way that the BBC would understand:
It's bollocks.
Watts Up With That's Anthony Watts has some details.
The article asserts that “climate change has already cut incomes in the US by around 12 per cent since 2000,” arguing that warming is quietly eroding wages and purchasing power nationwide through complex supply-chain effects. To reach this conclusion, the study imagines a hypothetical United States without man-made greenhouse gas emissions and then estimates how much richer Americans would supposedly be today in that alternate reality.
That is the fatal flaw in the article: these are not observed losses, they are modeled counterfactuals, i.e., guesses about what might have happened in a world where climate change never existed. If climate change were truly shrinking U.S. salaries by anything close to 12 percent, the damage would be visible in real economic indicators. Instead, over the same period the study claims massive losses occurred, the U.S. economy expanded substantially, real GDP increased, productivity rose, and average living standards improved. An economy supposedly being “picked clean” by temperature would not look like this.
In other words, what the BBC did was to take a SWAG - that's scientific-speak for "Silly, Wild-A** Guess" - at what the American economy may have been like, assuming the absence of any climate change. Anyone who has been paying even perfunctory attention to this issue knows that's a non-starter; the climate has always changed, and it always will change. It's not even a rational starting assumption. And again, the BBC engages in what has always seemed to me to be the height of human hubris: The notion that the Earth has a thermostat, and that we know what the planet's "correct" temperature range is, and can set that thermostat accordingly. We can't, and all it takes is one good volcano to tell us otherwise.
Maybe the BBC thinks that we'd be more prosperous if the climate had stopped changing, say, in the middle of the Little Ice Age, when crops were failing all over the northern hemisphere, and people were dying of malnutrition and exposure?
Anthony Watts has more for us to consider:
The broader empirical record directly contradicts the BBC narrative. The modest warming of roughly one degree Celsius since the late nineteenth century coincided with unprecedented economic growth, longer life expectancy, better nutrition, and vastly improved resilience to weather. Climate at a Glance documents one of the clearest indicators of this reality in “Deaths from Extreme Weather,” showing that climate-related deaths have fallen by more than 95 percent over the past century. If warming were already imposing a large, hidden economic tax, we would expect worsening human outcomes, not dramatic improvement.
The BBC article also ignores the role of CO₂ and modern agriculture in boosting productivity. Climate at a Glance summarizes NASA’s findings on global vegetation increases in “Global Greening,” explaining that rising CO₂ has contributed to increased plant growth and leaf area across large portions of Earth. It also documents surging yields in “Crop Production,” noting that crop yields for staples such as wheat, corn, and rice have risen strongly over recent decades. Those are real-world outcomes, not counterfactual guesses, and they are directly relevant to any claim that modest warming is already imposing large economic losses.
These are facts. American usable income, adjusted for inflation, has been increasing for the last 60 years - except, you might note, for a notable drop during the Biden administration. Climate change or no climate change, the BBC's claims are clearly, laughably wrong. But they are counting on their viewers and readers unquestionably accepting their hooraw.
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It's hard to understand what the BBC intended with this big helping of corral litter. Of course, many of the BBC's readers and viewers won't look at this with a critical eye, on either side of the Atlantic, and that's too bad. But this whole thing points to a bigger problem: The decline of science and logic education in our schools, in both countries. We're simply not teaching our young skulls full of mush how to think, how to reason, how to analyze, how to tell facts from horse squeeze. This is, largely, deliberate. In both the United Kingdom and the United States, our educational systems were a priority part of the left's long march through the institutions, and they have mostly succeeded.
Our schools aren't teaching kids how to think. They're teaching, or rather programming, them in what to think, and worse, not to ask questions.
I was luckier than most. My early reading of Greek philosophy, which my father insisted on, equipped me with tools like Aristotle's laws of thought: The law of identity, the law of non-contradiction, and the law of the excluded middle. These rules are as valuable today as they were in Aristotle's time, but we're not teaching them, nor any other rules of logic that have been known and applied for thousands of years. That's why the BBC can serve up nitwittery like this with impunity, and, for the most part, not get called on it.
