To the Editor:
As scientists who have dedicated our careers to critically evaluating the risks from a changing climate, it is dismaying to see a parade of patently false, thoroughly disproven statements about climate change in the letter to the editor from James Piereson (Vast Philanthropic Spending to Curb Climate Change Isn’t What’s Needed, April issue).
Mr. Piereson, commenting on Larry Kramer’s opinion article, “Philanthropy Must Stop Fiddling While the World Burns” (January), argues that we need to “abandon inflammatory rhetoric and worst-case projections.
But what he calls inflammatory rhetoric is mostly a frank description of trends that are already happening and have been documented in thousands of careful scientific studies. Mr. Piereson’s counterarguments, in contrast, are threadbare scripts, recycled among climate-change denialists for decades, while progress in science has systematically proven each to be incorrect.
Mr. Piereson’s letter makes, by our count, 20 claims about climate change and the technologies that can help reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Seventeen of these statements are false, two rebut red-herring statements that do not come from climate science, and one is not relevant.
The first of the incorrect claims is that warming since the beginning of the industrial age is mostly natural, a finding he incorrectly attributes to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ( IPCC). In fact, the IPCC in 2013 concluded exactly the opposite, that “it is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.”
In contrast to Mr. Piereson’s assertion that we are not seeing trends in wildfires, droughts, floods, or hurricanes, overwhelming evidence documents trends in their characteristics that matter to individuals and economies. For example, the area annually burned in wildfires in the Western United States has increased about tenfold in the last 30 years. Careful scientific detective work attributes about half of that increase to climate change. The number of hurricanes is not increasing, consistent with IPCC projections, but in both the Atlantic and Pacific, a greater fraction of hurricanes is growing to the most destructive categories.
Mr. Piereson is hopelessly out of date in his assessment that “renewable technology (wind and solar) is nowhere near ready for the primetime task of powering modern economies.” The rapid growth of wind and solar power in recent years is largely a result of their low cost. In fact, a main driver for the recent mothballing of coal plants has been their inability to compete with renewables on price.
We agree with Mr. Piereson that, over the past century, cheap energy from fossil sources has played a major role in helping billions of people rise from poverty. But that doesn’t mean we should ignore the negative impacts or stick with legacy technologies when we have better alternatives. What we should do is look carefully at the science and build on real evidence to plot a vibrant, sustainable path for our children’s future.
Christopher Field
Professor for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies
Director, Woods Institute for the Environment
Stanford University
Kerry Emanuel
Professor of Atmospheric Science
MIT
David Karl
Professor of Microbial Oceanography and Director of the Daniel K. Inouye Center for Microbial Oceanography: Research and Education
University of Hawaii, Mānoa
Pamela Matson
Professor in Environmental Studies
Stanford University
Veerabhadran Ramanathan
University of California, San Diego
James Randerson
University of California, Irvine
Benjamin Santer
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Susan Solomon
Professor of Environmental Studies
MIT
To the Editor:
Piereson’s letter misstates and minimizes the risks of climate change — whose deleterious impacts are already being seen and felt around the globe. He goes so far as to contend that carbon-dioxide emissions are improving the environment: “The oceans are healthy, crop yields are up, and food prices stable in part because of CO2 emissions.” This statement, like many others in his letter, is flatly contradicted by a massive number of scientific studies.
We, however, are not writing to correct his mistakes about climate science, but instead to correct another claim that Mr. Piereson made in his letter. He claimed that foundation funding had so far failed to move the needle of public opinion, “according to just about every opinion survey,” as he put it.
This is just plain wrong. In fact, all credible public-opinion research finds that a large majority of Americans are not only worried about climate change, but they also support much stronger policy responses to the threat than anything we currently have in place.
As researchers at Yale and George Mason University, we have conducted scientific, nationally representative surveys on climate change twice a year for more than a decade. According our most recent poll in November 2019, more than seven out of 10 American adults are convinced that global warming is happening, and 2 out of 3 are worried about it. An even larger number of American voters — 75 percent — support regulating CO2 as a pollutant, and more than two-thirds (69 percent) support a carbon tax on the fossil-fuel industry. All of these measures reflect significant increases over the past five years.
As the principal investigators on the most comprehensive set of national public-opinion data on climate change ever conducted, Climate Change in the American Mind, it is important to correct Mr. Piereson’s complete mischaracterization of American public opinion. Despite the well-funded misinformation campaign by the fossil-fuel industry and its supporters over the past several decades — including organizations that Mr. Piereson’s foundation has funded to the tune of well over $1 million — the American people are increasingly worried about climate change and solidly in favor of moving forward with climate solutions. Philanthropic funding has played a vital role in efforts to inform the American people about the clear and present dangers of climate change, and these efforts are working.
Currently, public support of climate policies is already high; it’s our political system that is failing to represent these widespread public views.
Right now, we need much greater philanthropic investment in climate change, particularly in increased public engagement, advocacy, and education efforts to ensure that the voices of the vast majority of Americans who support climate-change policies are heard and represented in our policy-making processes — or to ensure that the expression of public support is so strong that it can no longer be ignored by those in political power. We need that urgently, right now, to build on the success achieved so far. What we don’t need is more climate denial and misinformation.
If the world does not move quickly to ensure a safe, healthy, and thriving future climate, any short-term progress foundations achieve on most other issues will be lost.
Anthony Leiserowitz, Director
Yale Program on Climate Change Communication
Yale School of the Environment
Edward Maibach, Director
Center for Climate Change Communication
George Mason University
To the Editor:
Piereson’s letter argues against rapid climate action and for “tak[ing] a deep breath to consider what science and economics tell us about this complex problem.”
Climate change is indeed complex, but both the science and the economics cannot be clearer. In fact, it is precisely the latter that points to the need for action now.
In attempting to show that renewable technologies are “nowhere near ready for the primetime task of powering modern economies,” Piereson cites a highly misleading report focused on the social cost of carbon. The social cost of carbon is at once byzantine and absolutely fundamental to our understanding of climate action. It measures how much each additional ton of carbon dioxide emitted today costs society in today’s dollars. It is the result of one of the most standard tools in economics: benefit-cost analysis.
The principle is simple: Tally the benefits of action, and compare them with the costs. This is tricky, but the most standard of benefit-cost analyses — with lowercase-conservative assumptions aplenty — push us toward significantly more climate action than is currently on the books. The true price of carbon, meanwhile, is likely much higher still. Despite Piereson’s claims to the contrary, low-carbon technologies have an important role to play in a comprehensive set of climate policies.
There are indeed lots of uncertainties — and it’s precisely these uncertainties that make acting now even more important. All that easily refutes Piereson’s claim that it is simpler to let “fossil fuels continue to provide 80 percent of all energy well into the future” and take the wealth thus accumulated to address the problem later. The world does not follow some kind of Panglossian path, only to experience climate damages sometime in the far distant future. (Piereson cites “200 to 300 years.”) Climate damages are hitting home already, changing the very trajectory of and decreasing economic growth.
And yes, it is precisely the uncertain impacts that make a strong economic case for climate-friendly and clean-energy investments today. That is both smart climate risk management and smart economics. Early investment in research, development, demonstration, and deployment has led to dramatic cost declines in renewable-energy technologies. Globally, the price of solar photovoltaic energy has fallen by more than 80 percent in the past decade, 99 percent since the 1970s. Robust investment in clean-energy innovation can be expected to bring down the costs of additional technologies required to achieve deep decarbonization, making the economies cleaner and more resilient.
We are all currently experiencing a global problem with all-too-real impacts. While Covid-19 is playing out over days and weeks, it is a clear preview of the climate crisis unfolding over decades and centuries: rapid exponential growth; unprecedented economic impacts that affect especially the already poor and vulnerable. Delaying necessary action does not merely increase costs later; it leads to an entirely different trajectory, one with significantly more upended lives and livelihoods alike.
Gernot Wagner
Clinical Associate Professor
Department of Environmental Studies
New York University