Arguments
Getting climate risk wrong
Posted on 20 August 2025 by Ken Rice
This is a re-post from And Then There's Physics
Ted Nordhaus has a recent article in The EcoModernist about why he stopped being a climate catastrophist. His basic argument is that we used to think that we were heading for 5oC of warming, which would have been catastrophic, but are now heading for more like 3oC of warming. Despite this good news, many in the climate science and advocacy community have refused to become less catastrophic. Ted, on the other hand, has change his mind and is no longer a climate catastrophist.
I’ve been involved in discussions about this topic for more than a decade, and I don’t think I’d ever have described Ted as a catastrophist, at least not as I would expect it to be defined. This reminds me of when one of Ted’s early colleagues – Michael Shellenberger – also wrote an article in which he suggested that he was a reformed climate activist who was now condemning alarmism. It can be a convenient narrative; you get praised for changing your mind and others might think that if you can do it, maybe they can too.
What Ted seems to be suggesting is that those who continue to cling to climate catastrophe are getting climate risk wrong. There may well be some truth to this, but Ted’s article seems to largely dismiss any climate risk. Apparently, at local and regional scales, the impact of climate change is very small when compared to climate variability. Things like sea level rise and thawing of the permafrost will occur on very long timescales. Even though warming has clearly been measured, the normalised economic cost of climate related disasters isn’t increasing. There is also apparently an absence of an anthropogenic signal in most climate and weather phenomena.
Also, technological innovation and the development of clean energy is happening anyway and we decarbonised faster prior to climate change becoming a global concern than we have since. Although the article doesn’t argue against cleaner energy it does suggest that if catastrophic climate change is not looming then there’s no reason for a rapid transformation of the global energy economy at the speed and scale necessary to avoid catastrophic climate change.
My problem with these kind of arguments is that they’re not completely wrong, but they’re also not quite right. I don’t think it’s true that the impact of climate change is always small when compared to climate variability (think heatwaves and extreme precipitation). Just because the normalised cost of climate disasters isn’t increasing doesn’t mean climate change isn’t having an impact (how are you defining the null?). I also don’t think it’s true that there is an absence of an anthropogenic signal in most climate and weather phenomena (e.g., detection and attribution versus storyline)
Also, even if the trajectory we appear to now be on is heading in a less catastrophic direction than was thought to the case in the past, we’re still increasing emissions and the climate will continue to change until anthropogenic emissions get to (net) zero. There are also various uncertainties that mean that even if we do continue on the currently expected emission trajectory, we still can’t rule out warming by more than 4oC.
I don’t think this means that we should catastrophise, but I don’t think we should be complacent either. It should be possible to recognise that climate change does present some risks, even if there are going to be other factors that need to be taken into account when considering how best to motivate decarbonising global energy. As Stoat once said “if you can’t imagine anything between “catastrophic” and “nothing to worry about” then you’re not thinking“.
Ken, I respect your knowledge and experience in this field, and so it carries a lot of weight when you write an article like this. But it concerns me when I read a statement like the following,
"...the climate will continue to change until anthropogenic emissions get to (net) zero."
This statement implies we will get to net-0, and that the climate will stop changing once we get there. I'm convinced of neither of those arguments. I take it as a matter of course that everyone alive on the planet today is in deep trouble because of climate change and that the prudent course of action is to prepare as much and as fast as possible. To focus on how bad it will get may be counterproductive and useless, but preparing for increasingly severe climatic effects seems prudent, such as Paris is apparently doing (read here).
I believe that as a society we are still getting climate risk wrong, mostly because we just don't want to believe (1) that it is happening, (2) that it really is caused by us, and (3) that it will continue to get worse.
I am concerned that the rising chorus of moderate projections will lull people into a sense of complacency. Whether climate really continues to get worse or not, I think that our moderate response to a serious situation guarantees that we will never be properly prepared, and that we will not effectively slow its progression.
But that is my opinion, and I hope for everyone's sake that I am wrong.
If you tell your fellow hikers that taking the left trail ends in a cliff, you're not being an alarmist. Maybe its a tall cliff, maybe a short one. What you're really saying is there's no way back. What you know for sure is the elevation you're at now, and that taking the right trail keeps you at that elevation. Whether the left trail leads to a long drop or a short one, what you can say for sure is you won't recover your previous elevation, so that whatever the new one is, you'll be forced to accomodate to it. Climate change is obviously not catastrophic yet. But it is permanent, which not enough people understand: they are used to trails they can backtrack out of.
Secondly, I would say that its the pace of current climate change that is so troubling, not the absolute amount of it. Most of the ecosystems that share our planet won't be able to adjust quickly enough to that rate of change.
Well stated ubrew12!
There a couple of problems I have with this discussion about to what temperature we're headed. The underlying assumption is that we will get to net-0, and that once we get there we will have learned our lesson, the world will only have net-0 technology available to it, and therefore that we will never again go down the path of burning fossil fuels that release GHG's. This is the view presented in Star Trek, about how humans learn and evolve. But in the US we just repealed the only major legislation to even attempt a transition away from fossil fuels to renewable energy. Apparently it is possible and likely to reverse course.
There is also the assumption that the climate will always be ours to control. Therefore, achieving net-0 would mean stabilization of the environment. It is possible that by the "modest", good-news forecast of 3C warming that we have pushed the climate sufficiently hard to lock in warming that will continue for millenia. The predictions are not, after all, perfect. We really don't know for certainty what will happen at 3C.
I advocate for ridding ourselves of this discussion of where we're headed. Let's focus on decreasing GHG emissions as fast as possible and doing more to prepare for an increasingly difficult future. After all, if you had at your disposal an unimpeachable prediction that indicated 6C warming by 2100, with 100% certainty, if we did not alter our ways, and if you brought that prediction before the leaders of the world, is there anything in our recent experience to suggest that the current leaders would even change their opinions about what to do? Much less convince their electorate to go along with such a modified view?
I vote that we stop fixating on to what temperature we're headed, and simply focus on minimizing GHG emissions and preparing for what is coming.
Ted Nordhaus talks about climate issues. Its important to understand his background and involvement in certain organisations. He has a BA degree in history, and was a founding member of the Breakthrough Institute. Wikipedia has a good page on the Breakthrough Institute. Some key excerpts:
The Breakthrough Institute is an environmental research center located in Berkeley, California. Founded in 2007 by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus,[5] The institute is aligned with ecomodernist philosophy.[6][7] The Institute advocates for an embrace of modernization and technological development (including nuclear power and carbon capture) in order to address environmental challenges. Proposing urbanization, agricultural intensification, nuclear power, aquaculture, and desalination as processes with a potential to reduce human demands on the environment, allowing more room for non-human species.[8][9][10][11]
Since its inception, environmental scientists and academics have criticized Breakthrough's environmental positions.[12][13][14][15][16] Popular press reception of Breakthrough's environmental ideas and policy has been mixed.[17][18][19][20][21][22][15][23][24][25]
Programs and philosophy:
Breakthrough Institute maintains programs in energy, conservation, and food.[33] Their website states that the energy research is “focused on making clean energy cheap through technology innovation to deal with both global warming and energy poverty.” The conservation work “seeks to offer pragmatic new frameworks and tools for navigating" the challenges of the Anthropocene, offering up nuclear energy, synthetic fertilizers, and genetically modified foods as solutions.
Criticism:
Scholars such as Professor of American and Environmental Studies Julie Sze and environmental humanist Michael Ziser criticize Breakthrough's philosophy as one that believes "community-based environmental justice poses a threat to the smooth operation of a highly capitalized, global-scale Environmentalism."[12] Further, Environmental and Art Historian TJ Demos has argued that Breakthrough's ideas present "nothing more than a bad utopian fantasy" that function to support the oil and gas industry and work as "an apology for nuclear energy."[13]
Journalist Paul D. Thacker alleged that the Breakthrough Institute is an example of a think tank which lacks intellectual rigour, promoting contrarianist reasoning and cherry picking evidence.[15]
The institute has also been criticized for promoting industrial agriculture and processed foodstuffs while also accepting donations from the Nathan Cummings Foundation, whose board members have financial ties to processed food companies that rely heavily on industrial agriculture. After an IRS complaint about potential improper use of 501(c)(3) status, the Institute no longer lists the Nathan Cummings Foundation as a donor. However, as Thacker has noted, the institute's funding remains largely opaque.[15]
Climate scientist Michael E. Mann also questions the motives of the Breakthrough Institute. According to Mann, the self-declared mission of the BTI is to look for a breakthrough to solve the climate problem. However Mann states that basically the BTI "appears to be opposed to anything - be it a price on carbon or incentives for renewable energy - that would have a meaningful impact." He notes that the BTI "remains curiously preoccupied with opposing advocates for meaningful climate action and is coincidentally linked to natural gas interests" and criticises the BTI for advocating "continued exploitation of fossil fuels." Mann also questions that the BTI on the one hand seems to be "very pessimistic" about renewable energy, while on the other hand "they are extreme techno-optimists" regarding geoengineering.[16]
Thanks for some truth telling nigelj. Your opinions certainly match my worrisome ones too Evan. In climate system scientist Paul Beckwiths latest video www.youtube.com/watch?v=kz_MilyXkk0 I read in the comments section something very relateable to my public interactions,
"I have two personalities. One that is aware of our climate reality and one that I have for public life. Makes life surreal."
Thank you, nigelj, for exposing the BTI as a kind of apologist aggregator, which, upon a visit to their web page, I'd have to draw that conclusion. It not only downplayed renewables, I noticed several bizarre articles about how we needed to eliminate wilderness because it is so damaged that it causes undue suffering for animals living there, and how energy conservation/efficiency measures cause the famous Jevons rebound effect without looking into how this is a product of the capitalist endless growth pressure, which should be addressed at the same time.
Seems that the line has been crossed from a throughtful consideration of assumptions to an apologist site with an agenda. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.